CIO Corner: Cisco's Fletcher Previn on going 10x with AI

In a follow-up conversation, Cisco’s CIO and senior vice president discusses the impact of AI on development and his own role.

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth,Senior Editor,InformationWeek

November 10, 2025

InformationWeek

Fletcher Previn, CIO and senior vice president at Cisco, returned for a conversation on how AI has influenced his role and the overall development cycle.

InformationWeek spoke with Previn initially in 2023, just six months after he became CIO at Cisco. He returned to share how AI advances faster than Moore’s Law predicted, and ways it can evolve how teams function and focus on their tasks. "People are spending 75% of their time doing something other than what they said they want to be when they grow up,” Previn said.

He said that means there is an opportunity in the AI Era to rethink work “operating systems” and to democratize access to tools for efficiency within the enterprise. AI augmentation is also part of Cisco’s own in-house efforts to elevate efficiency, he said. “We’ve established a new goal for ourselves as ‘AI as an enabler for 10x productivity in IT and all employees,’” Previn said.

Related:InformationWeek Podcast: Getting buy-in for enterprise resilience

Read more about:

CIO Reality Check

About the Author

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth

Senior Editor, InformationWeek

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth edits stories for InformationWeek as well as reports on C-suite tech leaders across a multitude of industries and tech disciplines. He also hosts the InformationWeek Podcast, which brings together CIOs, CTOs, and other C-suite leadership to discuss their different approaches to addressing shared challenges. He joined InformationWeek in 2019, initially as a Senior Writer covering cloud computing and DevOps. He became a Senior Editor in 2023.

His work with InformationWeek garnered American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBE) awards in 2024. This included "Could the DOJ's Antitrust Trial vs Google Drive More Innovation?" as part of the team’s Government Coverage, which collectively won a Bronze National award and a gold Northeast regional award, as well as a bronze regional award for a Web Feature Series on the environmental impact of data-driven organizations published during Earth Month. That award included his story "How Do Supercomputers Fit With Strategies for Sustainability?"

He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight.

Joao-Pierre can be reached via email at [email protected]

See more from Joao-Pierre S. Ruth

Want more InformationWeek stories in your Google search results?

More Insights

Webinars

Industry Reports

Access More Research