Cisco to lay off more than 4,000 employees to focus on artificial intelligence::Cisco revealed plans to slash its headcount by 5% on Wednesday, which will affect roughly 4,250 employees across the tech behemoth’s global workforce.
“AI isn’t good enough to replace workers yet, but it’s good enough to convince CEOs it can.”
AI isn’t good enough to replace workers, but it could probably replace C-suite executives at astronomical savings to the company
One of the truest things I know about AI is: “we’re nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we’re certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job”
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit
Convinced the Air Canada CEO who just lost a court case over it
With all these companies pivoting to the creation of AI products, this seems like a great opportunity for someone to step in and create … Checks notes … absolutely anything else.
I can’t wait to watch these companies all get their marketshare eaten by “ToddCo”, a company where a guy named Todd figures out that be can poach Starbucks employees and get better results than these AI deliver.
The sixty minutes interview is going to be epic:
“Then it struck me! Sure, James writes my name wrong on my cup every day, but he’s never once misjudged how many limbs I have!”
“Our company is invested in the dynamic strategy of using people to solve problems. Person Intelligence or PI, as we call it. We know our strategy is out of favor now, but given that it has worked consistently throughout all of human history, we are hopeful for the future.”
How do you lay off people to focus on something?
Did they went “daaaamn, we want to focus on AI, but we already have people for that job, let’s fire them”?
Really kind of them to let their investors know first, rather than the people impacted. I bet morale there is wonderful.
Have any of these companies gotten anywhere after dumping people to focus on ai whatever that even means?
They’ll be fine for a time until competition emerges and their products become obsolete.
And thus the cycle begins again
I’m not really sure Cisco would fall even if the company fell. Cisco isn’t just a company that makes networking equipment, they’ve been influencing the architecture and paradigms behind the Internet for so long that their influence would be felt for years, even if they were to disappear today…
I don’t know, but Microsoft’s free copilot stuff is so not useful that it doesn’t make me feel the need to pay them for the business product
I paid the $30 today for their 365 Pilot and asked it to summarize a meeting for me that was recorded and it couldn’t even find the meeting.
But hey, I’m sure Cisco will do a better job. Everybody I know keeps asking about Cisco’s AI. Maybe it will finally give a good answer as to why I should pay a subscription to own an access point.
I’m in agreement that this stuff is painfully useless.
But “it couldn’t even find the meeting” sounds more like a configuration problem and less like a comment on the product’s quality.
