Cisco Podcast Network

Thirty-five years ago, there was no AI, no cloud, no smartphones—and no contract.
Just a handshake.

In this special episode of Shift Happens, Jeff Edwards sits down with John Van Der Vyver (NTT DATA) and Tony Meredith (Cisco) to explore one of the most successful and enduring partnerships in technology.

What started with a handshake in South Africa grew into a global relationship spanning 50 countries, serving 75% of the Fortune Global 100, and helping customers navigate every major technology shift—from networking and the internet era to sustainability, AI, energy, and beyond.
But this isn't a story about revenue, contracts, or transactions.
It's a story about trust. About showing up when things get hard. About taking risks together, solving problems that matter, and building a partnership that has thrived through 35 years of relentless change.

Why Listen?
🤝 The handshake that started it all — and the principles that turned a simple promise into a 35-year global partnership.
🌍 Real stories of innovation and impact — from saving rhinos through Connected Conservation to tackling the next generation of AI and energy challenges.
🚀 Lessons every leader can use — on trust, vulnerability, resilience, and why the strongest partnerships are built long before they're tested.

Thirty-five years later, the technology has changed. The world has changed. But the foundation remains the same: Trust. Partnership. People. Let's Make Shift Happen.

In this episode, we interview Sheikh Habeebul Haq who is the first visually impaired engineer to ever pass the CCIE exam. He didn't ask for accomodations to pass his CCIE, he developped them and took the actual legit exam over two days. And what about you ?what's your excuse for not being a CCIE ? :-)

In this episode of The Cisco AI Insights Podcast, hosts Rafael Herrera and Sónia Marques are joined by Cisco’s Technical Leader in Machine Learning Engineering Leticia Fernandes to explore the groundbreaking study, "A Comparative Study of Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Large Language Models for Mental Health Forecasting Using Smartphone Sensing Data," which evaluates how different AI architectures analyze complex smartphone behavioral data to predict future mental health states.

The discussion delves into the intricacies of forecasting mental health changes using five years of data from the College Experience Sensing dataset, highlighting how deep learning models, particularly transformer architectures, outperform traditional machine learning and Large Language Models by effectively leveraging personalized user behavior to identify subtle anomalies that could signal declining mental health, while also addressing the challenges of data imbalance and the inherent limitations of LLMs in processing high-dimensional, non-textual temporal sequences.

A special thank you to the researchers from The Singapore University of Technology and Design, that developed this month's paper. If you are interested in reading the paper yourself, please visit this link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.03603

This week’s episode starts with Ian’s birthday, a conversation about fitness age that quickly goes off the rails, and the very real realization that getting older is, honestly, kind of rude.

From there, Kat and Ian dive into something they’ve both been curious about lately: Claude.

Kat recently switched from ChatGPT and shares what’s actually been useful so far — from using Claude to organize her week and sort through newsletters to helping her think through work and spot gaps in her ideas. Along the way, they get into the bigger question underneath all of it: how do you use AI in a way that’s genuinely helpful, not just flashy? And when does knowing how to prompt well start to feel like a real skill in its own right?

Want to learn about how Cisco is powering AI, check that out here: https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutions/artificial-intelligence/index.html

Learn how experts are using AI, SASE, and data analytics to build a future-proof hybrid workplace. This Tech Unscripted episode explores how to balance technology, security, and the human element to create a truly productive workspace.