Cisco's HR chief is creating entry-level opportunities amid AI disruption

Ever worry about showing up to the wrong job interview?

That fear could end up being fortuitous. That was the case for Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people, policy, and purpose officer, who started her three-decade career at the digital communications giant after experiencing such a mix-up. She spoke with HR Brew about how that mishap led to her career, and how she’s thinking about opportunities for today’s entry-level talent amid AI’s labor upheaval.

Call center to HR. Katsoudas, who had been working in business development for a startup, thought she was interviewing for a similar role when she discovered she was actually interviewing for an entry-level customer support job at Cisco’s call center, a position that would require her to answer as many as 80 calls a day once hired—many from unhappy customers.

While the gig was below the pay grade for the role she intended to interview for, and she wasn’t familiar with Cisco’s technology, something about the job called to her. “I recognized that it was just a really cool opportunity for me to learn something new. It’s funny, because I think it was the first time where I actually trusted my gut,” she told HR Brew.

Katsoudas took the job, and the next year was promoted to team supervisor. She was later offered a role as a director with that team, but turned down the opportunity. It worked in her favor.

“I passed on the role because my realization was I had never made decisions, up until that point, based on title or a level,” she said. “And it took me two years from that point to make director in a totally different area, which happened to be HR.”

Katsoudas moved to Cisco’s HR department in 2003. She said she was curious about the inner workings of HR, and liked the team’s focus on baking business strategy into HR—something they did years before it became common best practice.

“We were able to take elements of Cisco’s technology strategy and say, How does this then connect to decisions that you make around people, culture, your tool set,” she said. “I loved that problem. I thought it was really messy, and a good one to solve.”

Rethinking entry-level. Katsoudas became chief people officer in 2014, and chief people, policy, and purpose officer in 2021. During her decade-long leadership in HR, she’s focused on creating opportunities, like the ones previously offered to her, for early career talent.

“I just remember having a ton of gratitude for the zigzag of my career and feeling committed to helping others have their own zigzag that they could be really proud of or really energized by,” she said.

Many entry-level roles have faced significant disruption from AI-driven automation. This is true of Katsoudas’s first role at Cisco. In 2022, the company deployed an AI assistant (which was upgraded this year) designed to answer low-level customer support inquiries that come into its Technical Assistance Center. The AI tech has now fielded more than 1 million cases, and Cisco has eliminated its level-one customer support roles.

That transition didn’t happen overnight, Katsoudas told HR Brew.

“What happened was the existing team started to get some help on particular types of cases with customers. As their volume was growing. AI stepped in, and then those people became second-level support,” she said. Now, entry-level call center employees are hired into second-tier support roles, which has prompted Cisco to rethink onboarding for that team.

“I feel like our onboarding approach is so much more robust than it used to be,” she said, adding that “you have to give them all of the learnings of level one because they’re stepping in where the technology couldn’t solve. Maybe a customer has two or three issues that they need help with. Maybe it’s not as simple.”

Currently, her team is focused on using AI to codify the skills and tasks required of every employee at Cisco, and understanding how that will shift as the technology evolves. “My goal for Cisco and for the organization is to leverage AI to help people navigate AI, and just to have as much transparency as possible around how we see the world changing,” she said.

“I don’t know of anyone who would say that the role that they’re in today was exactly the same as a year ago. Our roles are constantly evolving,” she said, noting that most jobs were evolving long before AI put those shifts under a microscope.

Despite this natural evolution, she said HR teams will have to be much more intentional with the opportunities they create for entry-level talent, whether through mentorship programs, new-hire communities, formalized onboarding processes, or other initiatives.

“I just think that people are all running so fast that if you don’t build programs around it, you may not get the impact that you want,” she said, noting that the first six months of a person’s job are critical to their longevity, performance, and satisfaction at a company. “I always laugh a little bit because they [new hires] are investments that you make as a company, but I’ve always seen that they return that investment and more as well.”