Cisco’s Cross-Functional Approach to Learning and AI: Marci Paino & Lawrence Stevens

Building a skills-focused organization isn’t just about creating learning content or adopting the latest technology. As Cisco has shown, the journey to a skills-first culture is as much about cross-functional collaboration, purposeful data use, and intentional alignment with business strategy as it is about implementing new platforms. In this episode of Workplace Stories, Lawrence Stevens, Director of Cisco Skills Strategy and AI-Powered Learning Ecosystem, and Marci Paino, VP of Enterprise Learning and Growth, share how Cisco transformed its approach to learning and skill development to prepare its workforce for the future.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...

• [08:14] Focusing on skills-first learning strategy
• [14:17] Reimagining company culture and learning
• [16:18] Analyzing current state for vision
• [29:38] Building a universal profile
• [32:48] The HR knowledge graph
• [41:44] Creating a Minimum Lovable Product 
• [46:05] Discussing data privacy challenges
• [57:11] Prioritizing continuous learning
• [59:12] Scaling solutions for growth

Breaking Down Silos

Unlike many skills initiatives that begin in a single HR function and slowly attempt to wrangle other departments down the line, Cisco’s approach was intentionally cross-functional from day one. Many organizations start skills work in isolation—often in learning or HR—and invite others along later. But at Cisco, collaboration among learning, talent acquisition, workforce planning, and IT was built into the initiative's DNA.

This deliberate design enabled the team to craft a skills strategy rooted in both business needs and employee realities. IT’s involvement was critical, as they owned the product build while learning held the vision and strategy. The resulting triangle—business as product owner, IT as builder, and vendor partners as enablers—helped accelerate innovation and ensure alignment.

Leading with Culture and Business Alignment

Cisco’s journey began with culture, not technology. Marci Paino first sat down with every member of the executive leadership team to understand business direction and set guiding principles before building out the learning and skills strategy. This top-down alignment was a deliberate move away from fragmented, optional learning ecosystems with little accountability.

By rooting skills development in company-wide guiding principles and leadership behavior statements, the team ensured that new ways of working and the future of talent were not HR projects, but business imperatives. This approach fostered executive buy-in and role-modeled cross-functional partnership from the outset.

Data as the Universal Currency

Laurence describes skills data as the universal currency that created common value for talent acquisition, workforce planning, learning, and the business. But getting there was no small feat: the team inherited a tangled landscape of 17 separate learning platforms and over 220,000 learning activities—each with its own taxonomy and data standards.

The solution was a ground-up rethink of data governance and taxonomies, with an eventual move toward a universal knowledge graph. This clean, connected data infrastructure enabled personalized, AI-powered learning and more effectively measured both skill proficiency and business impact.

The Power (and Challenge) of Partnerships

Whether negotiating the complex relationship with IT, co-innovating with vendors like Cornerstone, or role-modeling collaboration across HR, the Cisco team showed that no single function can go it alone.

Crucial to this was ruthless prioritization and maintaining clarity on the “minimal lovable product.” The ability to listen, compromise, and focus...