"We were never going to miss one again … We were never going to deny a transition was happening."

Cisco is one of the handful of companies from the dawn of the digital age that is still going strong. But as Chair and CEO Chuck Robbins told LinkedIn Editor in Chief Dan Roth, it isn't Cisco's many successes that propels him now, at the dawn of the AI age — it was missing the cloud wave.

That was then, this is now: Robbins says a small fraction of enterprises are prepared for the AI revolution and a vast majority know they don't have much time to get up to speed. Since Cisco has dealt with major enterprise customers for decades and still routes about 85% of the world's internet traffic, Robbins says Cisco is well positioned to seize this opportunity.

But navigating this tectonic shift in tech is only part of the problem. Robbins says the pace of re-skilling will be unlike the world has ever seen, and that getting people to adapt as quickly as necessary will require an emphasis on soft leadership skills.

In a wide-ranging interview we talked learning from mistakes, the need for "proactive education" to ensure the workforce can take advantage of a future of work that is already upon us, and why EQ is more essential than ever. 

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