Leadership in the Age of AI with Cisco’s CHRO

Mo Fathelbab: Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, President of International Facilitators Organization, People and Strategy is the podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week we bring you in-depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders.

For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by Kelly Jones, Chief People Officer at Cisco. Welcome, Kelly.

Kelly Jones: Thank you so much, Mo. Thanks for having me.

Mo Fathelbab: Great to have you with us. Kelly, I wanna start with your career journey. What brought you to the field of HR?

Kelly Jones: You know what's interesting? Like a lot of people, I never woke up and wanted to be a CHRO or, thought I would have a career in HR.

It kind of happened in a little bit of a haphazard way. I was, doing a completely different job and studying to go to law school. I was gonna be an attorney and I kind of got a call in the middle of the day, one day from my brother who worked for an IT consulting firm. I'm dating myself, but this was back in the nineties and he said.

My company is looking for entry-level technical sourcers basically to come on and help fill these technical jobs. And so I had kind of an atypical entrance into this coming through the talent acquisition side, but that was my very first job in HR. I did that for a few years. I led recruiting teams. I had my own IT consulting firm for a while, and then I came to Cisco and I've been at Cisco for.

It's going to be 18 years next month. It's shocking to say that out loud. and I'm on my 13th job here at Cisco, just across the, I think I'm a professional dabbler or tapas lover. I feel like I've done a little bit of everything in the talent space since I've been here.

Mo Fathelbab: Wonderful, So Kelly, data from the SHRM's recent, CHRO priorities and Perspectives report reveals that employee experience is among the top three priorities for CHROs in 2025.

How would you describe the current landscape, of the employee experience in the workplace today?

Kelly Jones: I would actually say we're dealing with a lot of challenges, you know, coming out of the pandemic. You see employees are, number one, very much still focused on this idea of flexible work, which I think is great.

We're a flexible work company. We embrace the concept of hybrid, but I'm seeing a huge movement around resistance to the idea of return to office and the idea of I have to be. Within these walls for these amount of hours. And it's driving a lot of interesting decision making. I'm also seeing kind of record, I hate to say this, but almost like low points in employee engagement and trust.

I think there's a lot of things driving this. I think the world, is a little bit chaotic right now. I think that there is a little bit of, with all the press around restructures that have happened, there's a little bit of. Skepticism about the workplace. So what I'm seeing is that trust is at a bit of a low, which is something we're all dealing with.

And employee engagement, is taking a bit of a dip as well.

Mo Fathelbab: so having said that, why is the employee experience so important, for a company's bottom line?

Kelly Jones: Oh gosh, the experience and, I love this question. Thank you for it, because I feel like the thing we don't always think about when we think about employee experience, sometimes it feels like this thing that we do just because we want of all, of our employees to be happy.

And certainly we want our employees to be happy, but employee experience drives productivity. Productivity drives business results, you know, business results, happy customers, and so employees that are engaged results in happy customers. We actually know that our, we, have a lot of data at Cisco, as you can imagine, so we do a lot of sensing and survey data, and we know that our employees who are getting regular attention from their leaders are free times more likely to be engaged and have significantly higher performance ratings.

So there's a real straight line that we see from employee engagement to happy customers.

Mo Fathelbab: So that said, you also recently wrote an article for the Cisco blog, I think it was called The Four Transformative Trends Shaping HR in 2025, where you noted missing element, to the conversations around AI and how it could enhance the employee experience to benefit employees and the company's bottom line.

So let's, dig into that a little bit. why aren't more leaders focused on AI in relationship to the employee experience?

Kelly Jones: You know, I think the conversation that's dominating the room and just taking up all the oxygen is the productivity conversation and the fear conversation. This idea that we can drive a ton of productivity through the use of this technology, and we can certainly that is there.

there's also the how do we get employees through and get them more comfortable working with the technology. I just haven't heard the conversation as much about how do we actually use this inflection time to uplift the employee experience, because those of us that work in HR and work on people teams, we came into it to try to make work better.

We spend a lot of time at work, and so anything we can do to increase that experience is positive. And I actually think that this conversation around how we can use AI to enhance the employee experience is one that we need to be having more because there's a ton of opportunity for personalization. I just got off a call with our CIO about 15 minutes ago, and we were talking about the amount of time that employees spend doing administrative tasks and in meetings, and he had some absurd statistic.

I think it was like 44 months of your life are spent like doing administrative things, approvals and things like that in your system. And so none of us thought we were 12 and wanted to do that for a living.

Mo Fathelbab: Right. So how can, how can AI help us enhance the employee experience?

Kelly Jones: You know, I think the first thing is let's give people time back and remove some of the drudgery.

And that one I think is out there. That conversation has been out there a bit. How can we take those tasks that are lower value and have those tasks become automated or done by a digital twin, or not be something that you end up spending a lot of time with, but if you park that one to the side, there's a whole host of opportunities here.

If you think about personalized systems, starting with onboarding, going all the way through the lifecycle of the talent stack. You know, there are a couple, I'm really excited about it. One is. Mobility. If you think about internal mobility and how it's traditionally worked, which is if you're an employee, you're interested in a role, you go on the career site, you look at the jobs, you decide what you think you're a fit for, you apply for those jobs.

It's not necessarily a smoother individualized program, but if you have these. Super personal experiences and AI understands your skills and your career path. They can actually give you really good suggestions by analyzing your skills, your interests, your outside of work interests and your career goals.

And it can really help to guide people to this kind of learning in the flow of work moment. And I'll give you an example of how I think of this. If someone is interested in a leadership role and they have decided, Hey, I think I wanna apply to be a people, leader. You can through AI, just in time learning interventions, basically push modules that will meet people where they are.

So it's not sitting down and doing this hour long training program. It's essentially an interactive module that will work with you, score where you are, and take you to different places depending on how you score and allow you to role play in a very safe space. And this is something that is coming up in the conversation about.

AI coaching. You know, this idea Will, AI ever replace coaching? I don't know that it will ever completely replace human coaching, but there is this opportunity to really do it in a super safe space. If you wanna role play or talk with someone, put your ideas out there and not worry about being judged by someone who might be in control of your promotional velocity.

It's got some real good opportunity,

Mo Fathelbab: so the AI is not gonna judge you.

Kelly Jones: I don't think the AI judges you. We'll find out. I think we'll find out. You ask it to, you know, 'cause AI is trying to please you. So if you ask it to judge you, it will

Mo Fathelbab: uhhuh. And what else is Cisco doing to uplift the employee experience?

Kelly Jones: Yeah. So for us, we look at this in a very holistic way from the moment you join us to the moment that you leave us. And so we look at, we have a lot of different programs that we bring Cisco. One of the things I really love about us as a company is we've got a deep focus on wellbeing and how we wanna make sure that all of the people in our ecosystem and, all the humans in our ecosystem are, having high degrees of wellbeing.

And this is another one I talk a little bit about in the blog post. I think wellbeing sometimes feels like a fuzzy thing, you know? Like it's this thing we do because it's nice. Wellbeing is actually a really good investment in business results because we need our people to do well and be well so they can do well at work.

Yeah. And wellbeing is one of those things that I. We all have it all the time. You know, we go through spikes and, downturns of it, but essentially, you know, we're living with it all the time. So we are focusing deeply on wellbeing of our employees through a variety of things. There's a piece, that we do around how we support people through change, and we support people through things that might be happening in their lives through the variety of benefits programs that we have.

And we're also experimenting a little bit with the AI interventions with wellbeing, which has been quite interesting. The idea of can we kind of understand where people are at any given moment and ensure that they have the resources that they need based on what they're dealing with, to, to be able to, address it.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that. So back to the AI conversation. How can HR leaders get their CEOs to invest, in AI to help the employee experience?

Kelly Jones: I think that there's a real narrative storytelling in this with, CHROs and CEOs and, I haven't had as much of a problem with that because I have a CEO that's very much leading from the front with this when it comes to AI adoption.

But I do think that like many things we have to be able to show. A business case, we have to be able to tell a story of what the experience is today, what the experience could be, how the employees benefit, how the work is going to benefit, and ultimately how our customers are going to benefit. So I believe this is just ensuring that we have the right level, the right seat at the table too.

You know, we talk about that a lot as CHROs. You know, CHROs are essentially business leaders on the people side. So ensuring that we bring that lens of, you know, the business impact of this to our CEOs so they can make smart decisions.

Mo Fathelbab: I love that. I love that. And we've, heard that before in many a conversation at SHRM is, how do we get that seat at the table?

Because, sometimes that is not the case. So thank you for, helping us double down on that. and so then let's talk about the result of all this work. How do you measure the success of these AI implementations? On employee experience.

Kelly Jones: Yeah. You know, we do a lot of sensing and listening data at Cisco, so we actually in the moment, pulse our employees to find out how it's going.

And with AI we're doing something really similar. So we have a few things that we've been rolling out around our AI augmented leader training, and that's really focused on, you know. Ironically, how we can use this technical evolution to unlock deeply human skills. And so what we will be doing throughout all of these programs that we roll out is periodically reflecting, you know, kind of going back and polling our employees to say, how is this working for you?

What have you learned? We're also looking at usage data. We have our own internal tools, as you can imagine, that we use at Cisco. Large language models that help our employees kind of do all the things they need to do. And that spans everything from just information about Cisco to, we're also adding it, we're adding our HR, all of our HR kind of systems on there so that you can, as an employee, go in.

Ask it a question, you know, you might say something like, what is our vacation policy in the us? And it will tell you that and then say, would you like to enter vacation days? And then you can actually do it from that link. And so we're also gonna be measuring when we embed these things, what is the time savings versus some of the traditional support models that we've had versus being able to use this kind of right in the model.

Mo Fathelbab: So that's beautiful. Something else you said earlier is still kind of lingering with me. Kelly, you said trust seems to be at a low point. What are you all doing to, bolster that and maybe what are you doing in general to build trust at Cisco? I.

Kelly Jones: I think one of the best things you can do to build trust is to speak often and inclusively about what you're doing and why.

You know, in absence of information, people will create a narrative about what it is that you're doing. So I would say we overcommunicate sometimes around, you know, the different steps we're taking and then this AI journey, it's really interesting. There's a lot of mistrust there. You know, there's a fear.

There's the fud, the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what's happening with my job. You know, what is this technology actually going to do? And what we're trying to do is bring our humans into those conversations because the lack of trust thing, if they're in the conversations, understanding how decisions are made, I.

People are gonna understand where you are a little bit better and they're gonna go with you. So use cases are a great example. AI use cases. You know, we have a large use case library at Cisco that we're building out for all the jobs where you can understand different prompts and different things to do to make your, role, to be more efficient in your role.

And we built those with our employees. We basically did a huge. kind of AI. Welcome to AI. We're doing the white belt, black belt partnerships to get everybody trained, and we ask them to submit their use cases. And so we are building it with our teams and I think there's something about designing with people and not for them that unlocks a little bit of, a bit, a little bit of that trust.

But I also think doing what you say you're gonna do, this sounds really basic, but like there's something in trust about if you say you're doing this thing. Do this thing, you know, like actually show up in the way for your employees. And you know, this idea of culture and the stated culture and the unstated culture, you know, whatever it is that you say that you're going to do and how you, whoever you are, however you articulate it, living true to that and how your decisions play out on a day-to-day basis, I think also builds trust.

Mo Fathelbab: So to that point, we've been hearing a lot about this fear of AI taking jobs, and AI has now been around for how long? I mean, at least mainstream for a year, if not longer. Have there been any jobs that have been lost at Cisco as a result of AI? You know,

Kelly Jones: we are, so we're, I don't wanna say we're early in this journey because we've been using AI tools for a long time.

You know, we've been using things like. Textio and different things to kind of scrub bias out of our job descriptions. And so we've been using AI tools for a while, but I think like a lot of companies, there was this belief that it was gonna happen instantly. Like the robots were coming for our jobs and you know, it was gonna be a conversation we were having last year.

But I think what we're finding, and in my conversation with some of the other CHROs, I. It's taking a little longer to feel out, to figure out where these productivity savings actually are, and so it hasn't resulted in that. We're also approaching it slightly differently in that we're saying, you know, if you are able to unlock.

Some, productivity using these tools. What would you do with that time? You know, we're actually trying to put a, growth element around that because we know that continuous learning is the way of the future. You know, skills have such a short shelf life. We're really focusing on how do we make sure that we're, always on learning organization.

And so the way we're kind of unlocking the fear is use these tools free up some time, and then use that time to actually go and kind of re-skill yourself.

Mo Fathelbab: I love it. I love it. So, and Kelly, how, I'm curious, have you personally used AI? Because, you know, we've, all started dabbling with it. we've certainly had a lot of, benefits from it and I just love to hear from you.

Kelly Jones: Yeah, I actually use it every single day. I use it every single day. Beautiful. Multiple times a day. And I know we look at usage and see where it is, and I'm pretty sure that I'm bringing up the usage for the people team because. I use it every day in for my work approved systems, and I use it every day personally.

And you know, some examples of that, probably my favorite way to use it. What you can do sometimes is fall in love with an idea that you have. I don't know if you've ever done this, where you have this idea. Yeah. And the more you think, yeah, you fall in love with it and then you marry it and then you're having discussions with others who maybe are seeing fault lines in your idea and are bringing those to you.

And there's a psychological. Barrier that can happen with, you know, with humans where you lock into this idea and it's hard to let it go. And I think we see that in a lot of things. And one of the great things AI will do is role play with you. Like I use it a little bit to say, I have this idea. And if you provide it with enough context in the prompts about what you're thinking about doing, and you actually say, tell me why this wouldn't work.

What are the things I need to be careful of? It will actually do that with you. Another thing it will do is, and we've been talking to our leaders about this a lot. Role play difficult situations. If you have an employee going through a, particularly challenging time, and you have a leader who maybe isn't as comfortable in some of the, you know, deeply emotional, compassionate discussions, you know, we have a lot of leaders.

They span the spectrum about how comfortable they are in those discussions. AI will role play it with you, you know, if you have to have a hard conversation. I've actually done that. I use it a lot for my writing, you know, just to clean it up and make sure that I'm getting my point across in a very succinct way.

so yeah, I use it every day. We used it to plan our most recent vacation, like personally, and I, hope there's no one taking this wrong that might work for Google, but it's kind of replacing Google for me because what I found is if you are looking to purchase something. Say you need a new washing machine and you Google, you know, show me the best washing machines.

You're gonna get ads, you're gonna get the people that pay to have the ads. But when you're actually putting it in the model, it's actually getting information that is ranking and rating the different, the different tools. So I use it every day, multiple times a day.

Mo Fathelbab: I think that is wonderful.

Thank you for that. so what approaches can companies adopt to balance the integration of AI technologies with the protection and development of their workforce?

Kelly Jones: First of all, I love this question because I think this question actually gets to one of the responsibilities that we have as people who work in HR.

You know, we're kind of the moral compass around how some of this comes into work. As we reimagine work, we reimagine tasks and it, this is a really interesting one because I. Looking at some of this, some of it is very easy. You can say, yep, the things that are kind of repetitive and data heavy, we're gonna go to tools for that.

There are other things that I think require deeply human skills, and so being able to understand what that balance is and how we can ensure that the deeply human skills like creativity and innovation don't get dismissed in this. So we are looking at things like, you know, how we bring our employees along with us from a training standpoint, from, both training on how to use AI, but the ethical usage of AI.

What are the human skills that you need as some of these other things that might be a little bit more tactical, start to go away. But I think that the, key in this, when I think about leadership and the future of leadership and the future of our workforce, is how do we help use it as a bit of an opportunity when we're making these decisions to help leaders kind of supercharge their compassion and become kind of their most human selves.

Mo Fathelbab: Great. Great, So Kelly, I'm gonna call you a rockstar, CHRO. and in that vein, what does it take to become a CHRO? Who is a rockstar? CHRO. How did you get there in that regard? What values, principles? Tools, what have you applied personally to accelerate your career? So, so, rapidly.

Kelly Jones: Well, thank you for saying that.

I don't know if I would call myself that, but I can share with you some of the philosophies that I've had as I've kind of grown my career. And I think number one, and, I, say this to people that I mentor all the time, don't be afraid of doing something if you don't have a hundred percent of the skills to do the thing.

You know, I mentioned earlier that I was a little bit of a. Tapas. You know, I, I to do a lot of things. A company like Cisco, you can do that because it's so large. You know, we have one company, many careers, and it happens, but it only works if you have a little bit of bravery around what that next job is.

And so I've often said yes to things if I was just intellectually curious about them, and maybe didn't have a hundred percent of the skillset to do them. So there's an element of bravery. I also think that, being a really good listener is important for these types of roles and being a good listener is.

Underrated. I think in today's society there's so much talking, you know, that we sometimes forget how important it is to, have really good listening skills. 'cause it also helps you understand what's really happening in your ecosystem. So a broad, diversity of experience I think is good for these types of roles.

Being a deep listener I think is good for these roles. the other thing I would say is I didn't start my career with an idea of I wanna be a CHRO. Here are the five jobs I have to be CHRO. I mean, I would love to say I did that and I was that thoughtful and that planful, I was not, you know, I took jobs that, the work was interesting, it was a problem statement I was very interested in and it was a leader I wanted to work for.

And so, you know, that for me kind of built the career so that, the other thing I would say is sometimes when we get very focused on something in a linear way, like I wanna be this and I'm gonna do these eight things to get there, we lose the plot. You know, there's so much goodness. From A to B in terms of learning and building your career.

So I would just say stay curious.

Mo Fathelbab: Oh, that is great. Great stuff. and my last question for you, unless of course it prompts a couple other questions, what piece of advice have you been given that has shaped your work or personal life?

Kelly Jones: Oh gosh. I got a great piece of advice when I was very early in career.

I think I was a senior manager at Cisco. and I had a great boss and I think at that time, I was a little bit of a Type A overworker. I don't know if you've ever known any of those people. A few in watching. Yeah. They might resonate. You tend to find when in the HR space, you know, we, we show up here.

that definitely was a part of my, early life and my early working life. And I remember one time I went to my boss and I was going on vacation and, his name was Paul. I, went to Paul and I said, okay, I'm gonna be gone for the next 10 days. Paul, these are all the things I had pending. I. I've driven all these things to completion.

Nothing should come up here. We're good here. I felt like my job was to tick and tie everything up so that when I left nothing would fall apart. You know? It was, that was it. And I remembered he listened to me and he kind of paused for about, five seconds. And then he said, I don't know if you realize this, but in doing what you just did, you're actually taking away your team's ability to be you.

And that was powerful. He said, there are people on your team that wanna do the job that you're doing, and so don't do that next time. You know, allow, your team to step in and do some of these things. It doesn't always have to be you and I had such an aha moment with that because as your career, as you change your HR career and the, Every level you go up, you're working with a larger team, and you're getting work done through more people. So this ability to let go of this idea that it's you all the time, I think is really powerful. And that piece of advice has stayed with me and I've passed it on many times.

Mo Fathelbab: So I do have a follow up.

How does, how has that impacted your teams? How would you think that has impacted your teams? Or how have you heard it's impacted your teams?

Kelly Jones: I think it's been great for my teams. I think sometimes it's a little scary because sometimes I ask them to do the things that maybe they haven't done them yet, but it's always growth, you know?

And I think as a leader, our job is to basically prepare these teams for whatever is next for them, whether it's on your team or on another team. And not have, you know, fear and concern about what that might look like if they leave your team. And so for my team, I think it's been pretty powerful. I'd love for you to ask them, but from what I can tell, it's been pretty powerful...

Mo Fathelbab: And their growth and development and and, their leadership path.

Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, that's where we will end it for this episode of People and Strategy. A huge thanks to Kelly for your valuable insights. What an honor it's been. You can follow the People in Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also podcast reviews have a real impact on podcast visibility.

So if you enjoy today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you could find all our episodes at our website, SHRM dot org slash podcasts. Thank you for listening and have a great day.