Cisco cuts 4,000 jobs while boosting AI and security investments
Cisco cut fewer than 4,000 jobs even after record revenue and a 15% stock jump, a warning that AI-driven restructuring is hitting healthy companies too.
Cisco is cutting fewer than 4,000 jobs, even after posting record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion and seeing its shares jump 15%, a blunt sign that AI-driven restructuring is no longer limited to struggling companies. The move affects less than 5% of Cisco’s workforce and underscores how aggressively profitable tech companies are shifting headcount toward AI, security and infrastructure bets.
The San Jose, California-based company said its fiscal third quarter ended April 25 with GAAP earnings of $0.85 a share and non-GAAP earnings of $1.06 a share. Product demand looked strong across the business: total product orders rose 35% from a year earlier, and networking product orders climbed more than 50%. Cisco also said it had booked $5.3 billion in AI infrastructure and hyperscaler orders year to date, then lifted its full-year fiscal 2026 outlook for AI orders to $9 billion from $5 billion and AI infrastructure revenue to $4 billion from $3 billion.
Cisco framed the cuts as a reallocation of resources, not a retreat. The company said it will invest more in silicon, optics, security and employees’ use of AI across the company. Most job notifications were set to begin on May 14 and continue globally. Impacted workers are slated to receive pro-rated fiscal 2026 bonuses, placement services and one year of access to Cisco U courses and certifications.
For monday.com, the message lands well beyond Cisco’s own org chart. Enterprise buyers keep rewarding vendors that can prove measurable efficiency, tighter security and faster deployment of automation, which makes the case for AI features, workflow controls and clear ROI stronger in both product and sales conversations. For engineers and product managers, the defensible work is shifting toward the parts of the stack that improve reliability, security and customer outcomes, not just feature volume. For sales teams, “our company is doing fine” is a weaker retention story than “our work is tied to growth, risk reduction or budget savings.”
Cisco’s latest move also fits a pattern. CNBC noted the company had announced about 4,000 layoffs in February 2024 and another 7% workforce reduction later that year, while TechCrunch said Cisco also cut more than 150 jobs in 2025 before this restructuring. That history suggests the company is using headcount as a recurring lever to redirect spending toward higher-priority businesses, and that kind of discipline is now showing up across the tech stack, including the SaaS companies selling into enterprise buyers.
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