Cisco layoffs 2026: 471 California jobs cut amid best revenue quarter in years and AI push

There is a sentence that appears in almost every major tech layoff in 2026. It goes something like this: we are investing heavily in AI, and to do that, we need to restructure. Cisco's version of that sentence came from CEO Chuck Robbins in May, when he told employees the company needed to make "hard decisions, about where we invest, how we're organised, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us." The opportunity, in Cisco's case, is AI networking infrastructure.