Earning the Commute: What It Takes to Make the Office Worth It Again | Bob Cicero

I fundamentally believe when you think about the impact of AI, we think that AI is going

to take 8 billion people on this planet and make it seem like 80 billion people.

But some of the tasks that we do every single day from the 8 billion people, it's going

to be driven by AI.

It's going to be this confluence of people that are coming to come together more because

that's really what's going to happen when the standpoint of some of the rogue tasks and

all those other pieces that you think about on daily basis go away.

You're going to be done by the digital worker and how do you really think about that from

the standpoint of bringing humans together more because what's actually going to happen

over time?

But this is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production.

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Companies are still trying to figure out what to do with the office.

Bringing people back, stay remote or something in between.

But most of the conversation is missing the point.

Bob Cicero is America's future-proofed workplace director at Cisco and is working on what

the next version of the workplace actually looks like.

Combining AI, data, and physical space.

Bob, welcome.

It's right about now.

Ryan, thank you.

This is great to be here today.

Thanks.

I'm excited to talk about this because it's been on my mind.

I have condensed my team and South Carolina has been a different place in many regards

to the rest of the world.

But there are certainly corporations here that have had the same challenges and issues

of making the workspace somewhere where people want to be.

I always said, this is going to be a hard genie to put back in the bottle philosophically.

What are your thoughts on all this?

It is a hard genie to put back in the bottle.

You think about COVID, March of 2020, just passed, can't believe six years ago, and you

think about it.

Everyone home for two years, and habits formed, and lifestyles are formed, and how do

you put that genie back in the bottle to effectively get people back to the office?

It really depends on your view in terms of where work truly happens, and you think about

the changes that we've undergone since COVID.

What's happening from an AI standpoint, and thinking about the capabilities on the digital

worker side for us all interface with, and how do you solve that problem?

And people really want to be in a space and not being forced to be in a space, because

we've seen this shift in the past four years of mandates, and from a return to office

standpoint, or a TO standpoint, mandates haven't worked, and so what you've seen is that

people want to go to places that are inviting, that have all the technology components they

need to operate.

And really, that's really where that genie is out of the bottle, but we need to work with

the genie when it's out of the bottle.

As an entrepreneur who's very innovative and thought that I'd be like it didn't matter

where we worked, my team and everything, I've done a complete 180, it actually matters

a lot.

I don't know how to promote still, but it's hybrid.

I mean, I'm a small business owner and have a handful of people that work for me.

So it's not the safest Cisco or large corporations, but in some ways, though, I thought that we

could do things remote, but it's really important to be together.

It's important that we tackle this the right way, but as someone that owns a business, though,

that's innovative, and it's not just because we always do it that way, it actually is important.

That's been something a learning lesson for me, because I thought I was going to be the

other way, but then I was like, we worked better when we're together in a lot of ways.

When you think about the changes we've been over in the past four years, it's folks that

I'm 100% remote, but there is value in people getting together.

The value becomes, as Ed, is it forced to come together or do people want to come together

and truly earning the commute, if you would, around the space that they occupy, but people

are coming together, whether it's the solve problems, the brainstorms, the socialize.

At the end of the day, it's human interaction is important for people also feel fulfilled

about the work that they do, be part of something bigger than themselves.

That doesn't happen through a screen.

That happens when you're physically together.

It's that balance, though, it's, is it five days a week?

It depends on the organization, but there is a balance from a hybrid perspective in terms

of people coming together, but when they come together, it has to be valuable.

They have to have the tools there that they need to be productive, just not for themselves

there, but also for any remote participants, but it is finding that balance for the organizations

for yourself.

We said, a small business, it makes sense for you all to be together at times, but there's

times you do remote work.

This goes the same way.

It's the same in terms of balance from the standpoint of what actually makes us most

productive.

What if you think from senior leaders as far as the general consensus around these things?

It's easy, maybe to go, well, the older guys just won't us here in person for no reason.

I don't know if that's necessarily the case, but I have to think there's a bit of that

on some level, but I'm just curious.

You're at a large corporation, probably seen others, talk to others in your field.

It is the general climate with leadership in this area.

It totally depends on the industry, and you talked about the generational gap.

Older leaders feel more comfortable because they've been doing it that way forever in

terms of folks being in sea, but it's also industry dependent.

There are some industries that I call the apprentice-based model of work.

Someone doesn't become a great lawyer by sitting behind a screen.

It's a apprentice model.

It's an associate works with a partner who learns that trade, same thing in finance.

So it really depends on the type of work that you're doing and the way that you learn,

and a lot of times it is that apprentice model, which drives an in-person culture.

What's interesting is that leaders that are uncomfortable with the fact that folks might

not be together are really achieving the goals that we have as an organization.

And then how do you put a model together that you can achieve the goals of an organization,

but also cater to what people want?

You talked about that genie coming out of the bottle.

The genie's out.

You've got to cater to what people want.

But the same time is we need to prepare for the future.

I fundamentally believe when you think about the impact of AI, we think that AI is going

to take 8 billion people on this planet and make it seem like 80 billion people.

But some of the tasks that we do every single day from the 8 billion people, it's going

to be driven by AI.

It's going to be this confluence of people that are coming together more because that's

really what's going to happen when the standpoint of some of the road tasks and all those other

pieces that you think about on daily basis go away.

You're going to be done by the digital worker and how do you really think about that from

the standpoint of bringing humans together more because what's actually going to happen

over time.

We're on like a wavelength here.

You're like reading my brain.

When you were talking, I'm sitting here going, the AI is perfectly situated to literally

do the tasks that we were doing at home.

Maybe there were more conducive to that.

The humans are needed to sort of get in the room and have some ingenuity and some creativity

together.

It's for sure.

And you think about sure AI and thinking models that are out there and models are going

to get better over time, but it's really the value of humans getting together and really

thinking through an issue that the machine might not be able to do or provide some creative

thought to come together.

But your point of task that you did were done at home is the digital worker going to do

that for you.

Maybe?

Probably.

When we first started this, we were thinking about how do we amplify humans with the intersection

of people, space, and technology.

Now we have this added component on it that's clearly coming at us from a technology perspective

when we think about that.

It's still that.

But some of the tasks are going to be taken away and it's really going to be this further

amplification, I believe, of the value of space and what is actually happening there

with the humans that are occupying.

Interesting.

Bob, talk to me about like your daily role.

What does Bob Cicero do every day?

What problems is Bob solving?

We started this journey before the pandemic, quite honestly, as a company.

If you look at Cisco and our heritage here and our history is dot com boom, then we

are wiring the world for the internet.

And then we were catering to employees that want to work remote many, many years ago

in the pandemic hit.

In 2019, we actually came together as a group and as part of that group and side to organization

to really rethink the value of space and what you actually need to put into that space

for humans to do their best work.

Starting at that effort in 2019, pandemic hit in March of 2020 gave us a lot of time to

think as we were sort of installed in terms of what the world was going to be.

We reimagined our work spaces and workplaces and really wanted to bring to the market something

unique and different in terms of the space that we all occupy.

There's a lot of operational burden and costs that goes along with it.

You think about real estate inside of most organizations.

It's not trivial from a dollars and cents perspective.

It's a lot of times it's number two costs.

Then can we take sort of an IT view and bring that to the built environment in terms of

thinking about notion of platform across all this to amplify that intersection of what

I talked about before people, space and technology, dream, redrapped the market, our space.

And then now from a customer standpoint, customer, it's really interesting to see you think

about real estate in general.

It's a long time to make decisions and you think about most corporate leases 10, 15, 20

year options, etc. The industry hasn't moved fast, but it's being forced to move fast in terms

of what's actually changing.

Also work with customers in my team, work with customers every single day to really start

reimagining space, but thinking about technology enabling the experiences where before it was

really about the architectural elements, which are still obviously important.

But it's a tech piece that was forgotten.

We have to bring that forward with that data mindset we talked about a little bit.

For us to get prepared for the future, give me an example of what that looks like, maybe

even through the lens of Cisco, how have this technology in space, give me like a real

world example of a space at Cisco that may have changed or something that we could put

our wrap our head around with what that looks it feels like.

Work started in 2019.

It was really for a key project for us in New York City, our pen one space.

That was really reimagining space.

And if you look at space types and space mix,

as an organization, traditionally, folks have a lot of focus work space where it's a desk.

Because you're going to come in, you're going to sit at your desk and that desk is assigned

to you.

Yes, sure you might have done hot desk and go out telling, but then you have a group of

their spaces that were really for collaborative moments where the we side of the world.

You think about the me is focused, we is the collaborative space.

We took that approach and we flipped it.

We used to do 30% of we and 70% me.

We flipped it on its head, 70% we, 30% me.

And at the time, people were like, I in the world, do you need all this collaborative space?

And we felt like it was that fundamental moment that it was going to be about groups of people

getting together, not about sitting at your desk.

And as we fast forward here over the past four years, since we've opened,

we've got 14 of these sites around the globe.

And it's interesting there was just a large architectural firm that released a report today

that talked about space type, space mix, collaborative space.

That's the future of it.

We see that and we saw it early on.

But I think what the uniqueness was is our ability to have data about the space

and really thinking about how do you count people inside of a room as an example.

With the technology, we have as we power by Nvidia and our technology,

we're able to count people.

We know what's happening and we can cater to that and really bring that forward

from the standpoint of employees to be able to enjoy the space.

But it was that fundamental shift on just not space type.

But we really wanted to think through what else was important to the organizations.

How do we think about energy from the standpoint of electrification

and changing the way we electrify?

We're thinking about the network.

If you think about Cisco from a core technology standpoint, we're known for the network element.

Well, network is just not about data.

It's also about power.

We're re-electrifying everything in the built environment,

light shades, mechanicals, etc.

Thinking about health and wellness.

Health and wellness matters.

The amount of natural daylight that we get every single day.

The air quality that we breathe,

it matters every single day.

The noise levels inside the environment.

Because all of us are unique and different.

You think about neurodiversity.

20% of the world is neurodiverse.

How do we bring all of that to space?

And then ultimately, all of this for us is really underpinned by data.

When you think about space and place,

that industry never thought about data.

They thought about badge swipes.

Swipes of someone walking into a building.

I swipe in.

That's great.

Someone's there.

Fantastic.

What are they doing inside?

We really wanted to bring that forward in terms of this notion of having all this digital footprint.

If you would of the intersection of people's space and tech and the tech providing that.

But we also knew that the world was developing AI.

And so when you think about AI,

AI is three pieces.

It's data.

It's a model.

And there's the compute to make all that stuff happen.

If you don't have the data,

you're never going to have a good model.

For us, it was really preparing for that future view.

And you think about real estate is that long tail.

That's why we started this five years ago.

I love talking to smart people.

How do you tell people breaking down complex things into actually simple ways?

The me we thing is so simple.

But it totally reframed my mind around, okay, the team environment.

It's like BDI and CDI back in the day when I used to do branding for Verizon and Apple and Samsung.

I was like, thank.

I get into you, the me and the we.

I envisioned the floor plan with W's and M's.

Literally, I was thinking through that.

What people fail to realize is there has to be intention when you build something and you have space.

My dad, you always say the unintended consequences of decisions.

If you set up an office, the way you've always set it up,

everyone goes to their cubicle or their office.

It's a lot of me, but open floor plans and thinking through, okay,

it's going to be a lot more important that we're collaborating,

that we're meeting, we're doing these things,

using the technology and the grid.

It is a simple concept.

We and me, the old adage of there's no iron team.

It's the we space because that's where we're going to get people together

to accomplish the goals of any organization.

And that's going to make people want to come back to work.

Because they're not going to want to come back to work

to go sit in their cubicle to do what they could do at home.

And if we're going to have AI doing a lot of that work,

then we need to have people together collaborating on the things that push the company forward,

the human aspect that drives what we do, the ingenuity,

whatever it is for your industry.

That's super key to get people want to come back.

Absolutely.

One of the biggest things you heard after the pandemic when people were going back is,

why am I going back and sitting at a desk on a pick your platform,

a choice on the meeting side?

It could be WebEx, it could be Zoom, it could be Teams, etc.

They're sitting at their desk on meetings with people that are on the same floor.

Why are we doing that?

You pointed to their meeting space.

One is they don't have enough we space.

You go into their we space.

It doesn't have the right technology for them to be efficient.

Thinking about space layout and how do I get to those spaces?

Are they on the other side of the floor?

But at the end of the day, people are humans like patterns

in terms of how we work.

And every single day your program to wake up and you might get a cup of coffee

and have some eggs or whatever your wanting routine is, workout, etc.

But we didn't provide that for employees and we were wondering

where everyone's shocked around, well why are people sitting at their desk?

Well, you go into the rooms, they don't have the capabilities they need.

Now even so today, people are like, oh great, we got together.

We're in the room, but everyone brought their laptops

is around the same meeting.

And everyone has speakers muted and maybe one person has speakers on.

But it's like we don't have the right makeup of just not the space

but all the components that go inside.

The way that space is envisioned and designed and built.

Unfortunately, technology was last in the process.

Technology was never first.

We're not saying it'd be first.

We're saying make it your second choice.

And then the tables and shapes and all these pieces should follow.

So you have a great experience for the Wii

because that's the reality of the world.

It is about Wii.

It always was tech last.

It's like you designed it, architecture,

paint even comes before the damn tech.

It's like what color the walls are going to be?

Has that cabinet look right?

Is this table look good?

And then okay, well let's make sure we might

can run up ethernet core underneath the table.

I always came last.

The industry of technology as a view of being complex

as developers of technology.

I like to think that we invent a future

in terms of what we do at Cisco.

From our core business is we have to make it easier.

There's this pursuit of making it super easy.

And we think about sort of how do you design space

and how do you make it better faster and more cost effective.

And you build it.

Same all these pieces need to work in.

It's like an orchestra.

They need to come together for it to just be amazing.

When you're done, the effort.

We're talking about the space, Bob.

It's also about the communication.

You've got a little bit of this disconnect.

Let's just call the space a spade.

You've got leadership that fills a certain way.

You've got middle management.

It fills a certain way.

You got daily employees that fill a certain way.

There's some amount of disconnect going on

because a lot of people don't have Bob Cicero's directing the show.

Where does the space and the messaging align

as far as internally with connecting all of these dots?

We're very fortunate that Cisco or CEO of Chalk believes

that space is a magnet and not a mandate.

So how do you make it?

So space is a magnet.

Fundamental different shift on a viewpoint of that.

But when we think about the ability

to people to get together and how do you actually

have that change happen,

it's change management at the end of the day.

When you think about change management,

what does that mean?

I need engaged leaders.

None of this works unless you have engaged leadership.

The engaged leadership is just not from the top.

It's engaged leadership from the bottom up as well.

Everyone that's in a leadership role,

it's just not about leading people and leading the purpose

and all the other elements.

It's about leading the ability for people to get together

and the value of the space that comes together.

What happens is that manifests itself

and sort of gets this word of change management around it.

But it's continuous.

It's not a point in time.

Do a big change management effort and I walk away

and everyone just gets it.

It's this constant evolution and change that needs to occur

that these engaged leaders really need to drive

from an organizational standpoint.

We've had a lot of success inside of the company

because we've had those engaged leaders.

Those engaged leaders to really drive that change

as an organization.

I picked this term up.

Earn the commute.

What does that mean in practice?

Earn the commute.

It's real.

It's it.

We think that you're competing with the home

for you to compete with the home.

People have their own home set up.

That's to their tastes and likes.

But also they have a commute that's standing in front of them

to get into the office.

And we think every given day,

people are going to wake up and be like,

okay, they're going to run a little equation in their head.

This is what's the return on commute?

What's my return on commute value if I go into the space?

This earning the commute notion.

It's really about having space be differentiated.

It's not about the same color walls

and how do I build it for the cheapest price

that I can, which oftentimes you think about in times of space.

It is a huge cost,

but how do you invest in the right components

to be able to make it inviting?

But then more importantly is

is that what we think is the differentiating factor

is thinking about this technology in a few space

where people just come in and it just works.

And it's everywhere.

It permeates the entire space.

People can roam about.

It's that when they come in,

it's a delightful experience.

It's not about a barista.

It's not about free lunch.

It's not about people have a monetize their spaces.

We think about landlords of monetize their spaces.

People are like, I'm going to bring free lunch in.

That's great.

But the reality is,

is that it's really about how do you take friction out of the work day

for when people come inside of the space?

That's what we fundamentally believe.

Think about when we say earn the commute.

We want to earn the commute when people wake up in the morning.

Do that equation in their head and they're saying,

I'm making that commitment,

because there is value,

but when I go in to be with my colleagues

and others inside the organization,

it is just a delightful experience when you come in.

Talk with Bob Cicero.

He is the America's future.

Proofed workplace director, Ciccia.

My mind goes in a lot of different places.

And part of me, I'm going to be honest right here, Bob.

This is an honest moment here, on right about now.

And they read, listen to my show,

nose, I'm honest in all times, direct to a fault.

Where does it rubber hit the road a little bit with?

It's called a job, dammit.

You get paid to do work.

And work isn't fun.

And work isn't playing video games at home.

The evolution of the workspace needed to happen.

We needed Bob Cicero's of the world changing this

to make it conducive for people to want to go,

but also to recognize that it is adding value

to the job that they do,

which is I think a lot of what we've been talking about.

But then also the other day,

hey, you got to roll up your sleeves and work, baby.

That's just BB and direct, Bob.

It's work always fun.

No, but at the end of the day,

it's for us to get together and drive this notion

of this great work experience.

Part of it was, is that not just reimagining the workspace,

but it's within an industry that moves slow.

It was a really small step changes.

And over time, maybe it's a big change,

like in two decades.

But at some point, you had to draw a line in the sand

and it's like, okay, yes, we're coming in

to get a job done,

depending on what your line of work is.

Hopefully you feel like you're part of something

bigger than yourself.

But we had a change in industry that moves very slow

in this radical transformation that we did

as an organization was people looked at us and I can't believe

you all did this.

Now, here we are four years later.

The industry is agreeing with it.

We're 14 sites in as to organization.

And we're taking this show on the road

from the point of view of for us as an organization globally.

We've got space in Milan, we've got space in London,

we've got space in Paris,

around the globe for us to execute as an organization.

But I think there is something fundamental to is that

you can make the work more enjoyable for individuals

depending on the space that they're in.

It's widely like the home.

It's because they're comfortable there.

It's them.

It's a piece of them in terms of what they like.

That we think through that.

It's yes, at some point, it's redirect.

Get back to work.

Sure.

But also, when you get there, you gotta feel good about it.

Not just the work that you're doing,

but also the space that you're occupying.

Just no nap pods, Bob.

No nap pods.

We have no nap pods.

That's where it cuts off.

You know, like, come on.

You know, you take a break.

Take a break.

We got a basketball goal at the back, Bob.

We got Xbox, but no naps, no nap.

Take a rest.

Yes, to, you know, five minute mind.

Yees.

This can't handle the nap pods.

I don't know if there's still exists a Google or not,

but supposedly they did it one time.

They certainly did.

I don't know about today, but what we've seen is

that when you think about this fundamental change in space,

for us as an organization, no one has their own space anymore.

I don't have an office with my name on it,

but it's the different types of spaces.

And what we see is that people will migrate throughout the day

to different space types.

And we typically see them touching five to six different

space types throughout the day.

And you think about that.

And I think about the history of the past six years

that we've been through.

Is that when COVID hit?

Personally, I didn't sit in one space the entire day.

I roamed around the house and I went into the kitchen,

went to the living room, went into that deck.

And we're seeing that.

That's how human beings want to be.

And now we're providing those capabilities

and we're proving it.

We see it in the data.

It is five to six different spaces

that people touch every single day.

How is AI actually impacting physical office space?

When we see AI from a physical AI standpoint,

that notion of physical AI, what we're starting to see

is that if you have the data, you can create a great model.

What we're seeing now is that we have, as an example,

of our Penn location is 5,000 data points

every second coming up.

So we have this treasure trove of data

to really influence design.

Some of the things that you're thinking about

is on the design side.

Well, if I have all this data,

I mentioned five to six different seating settings a day.

The mentioned 7030 split.

How should you program space for organizations?

If you have this data, how do you program the space?

How do you look at things visually?

We're producing tools as an organization.

You can design one of the biggest aha moments

was when you're thinking about mixed presence,

physical and virtual coming together.

An architect is trained for physical.

It's what they went to school for.

Because this notion of mixed presence was never talked about.

But in order for you to absolutely have a phenomenal

mixed presence experience,

you'd think about technology forward, as I mentioned before,

table selection, angles of table,

all these other components became super critical

to have a great experience.

We had to turn it into a tool.

And so this journey of AI, and we think about AI

where it is today, data is informing language models

or tools that are coming on the marketplace

for space planning, et cetera.

How do you program the space?

But ultimately, we think about this world of agentic.

The industry talks about this agentic AI.

Who knows, we might have 10 digital workers,

we might have 100 digital workers, each of us.

But then we think about a space, a four-waltz space.

That's going to have an agent.

You think about a place that's going to have an agent.

And then agents are going to operate on all sides

in the house of IT, the real estate side.

All these agents are going to be consistently

communicating together.

That's where the industry's heading.

Well, we think about where it is right now.

People have to get the data right.

You have to have the data to inform.

And now we're seeing all these models come out

with space design, et cetera.

And so you see Nano, Banana, and all those other models

that are out there from like a Gemini perspective.

And you can add texture and type all these other components.

That's just going to accelerate.

You think about the changes that's occurred

since the first time you've logged in,

the maybe Chatchy PT, and used it.

You're like, wow, this is amazing.

And now you see where it's going is,

we're creating images that way.

We're animating space.

We're working on a project right now

as an organization where we created

the vision if you would with AI.

And then we animated it to put humans in it with AI

all in 24 hours.

What's happening is that when you look at yes data

to models, but it's this rapid pace of change

and people are going to expect you to build faster

and drive this change faster with the AI tools

that are coming to market.

It's really mind-blowing how many data points.

I'm thinking to do in the math,

like what you're talking about, how many data points there are.

Bob, where could everybody keep up with you?

What you guys are doing at Cisco?

Give me some links, some social, anything like that.

I'm LinkedIn, most active for that.

Where's the company, right, Cisco?

Follow us on all the major social media elements

is where you can find us in terms of what we're up to

because we're not stopping.

We're actually accelerating, which is the exciting part.

Hey guys, look, it's not about

whether people should go back to work or not.

It's about being a magnet.

Bob used his CEO's words best.

That really stuck with me.

You got to be a magnet, not a mandate.

I love that.

I'm going to use that moving forward.

We really appreciate Bob.

We appreciate Cisco.

We bring on a lot of their leadership.

An amazing company doing amazing things to push us past.

What we used to do in to the future.

We'll see you next time on Right About Now.

This has been right about now with Ryan Alford,

a Radcast Network production.

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