John Chambers, Cisco’s former CEO, said leaders need to reinvent themselves every year.
Refreshing a company’s strategy every two to three years is no longer sufficient in this AI age, he said.
The pressure to keep up with AI is already being felt in many boardrooms.
John Chambers has a message for executives in AI: Remake yourself every year or risk falling behind.
“Most leaders do not reinvent themselves,” said the former Cisco CEO and current VC on an episode of the “Grit” podcast published Monday. “As a leader in AI, you have to reinvent yourself, in my opinion, every year.”
This is because AI is moving in “internet terms” at “five times the speed” and delivering “three times the results,” Chambers said.
That pace means companies will succeed and fail faster than ever before, he added. He was the CEO of Cisco from 1995 to 2015.
The pressure to keep up with AI is already being felt in boardrooms. JPMorgan Chase on Monday told investors that starting this year, less of its $95 billion in annual spending will go toward hiring as the bank seeks to do more with less, thanks in part to AI.
LinkedIn data showed that since the fall, AI hiring has risen 30% faster than overall hiring. By 2030, 70% of the skills required for most jobs will change due to AI, the company said.
Chambers, who now runs JC2 Ventures, said refreshing a company’s strategy every two to three years is no longer sufficient. In this AI age, the lack of change just means “you’re not getting the leverage out of it, you’re chasing the new shiny object,” he said.
Reinvention, in his view, means rethinking everything from target market and products to how companies differentiate and go to market.
Chambers said a founder he works with has grown his company 100% year-on-year and still cut his head count by 10% because he used AI “to change everything.”
The founder uses AI not only for his core product development, but also in sales, analytics, forecasting, and customer service, Chambers said.
Large language models, often seen as the cornerstone of AI, are also quickly becoming commoditized. What sets companies apart now is how they use AI across their entire tech stack, he said.
Across the tech world, executives are voicing a similar urgency — that keeping up with AI means constantly adapting, or risk falling behind.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who considers himself an AI optimist, said the tech transition comes with responsibility.
“One of the things we have to watch is that the pace of this transition may be quick, it may be quicker than other technology transitions in the past,” Jassy said while speaking at the Harvard Business Review Leadership Summit last month. “We have to make sure that we’re responsible about the way the algorithms work and the way the models work.”
Consulting firms like McKinsey and BCG are also echoing this shift. ‘
“About 40% of the work we do is analytics-related, AI-related, and a lot of it is moving to Gen AI,” a McKinsey senior partner told BI last year.
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