Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Earning the Commute: What It Takes to Make the Office Worth It Again | Bob Cicero

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

In this episode of Right About Now, Ryan Alford sits down with Bob Cicero from Cisco to break down what the future of work actually looks like—and why most companies are still missing the point. As AI begins to take over repetitive tasks, the real value of work is shifting back to human connection, collaboration, and creativity. From the post-COVID workplace reset to the rise of hybrid models, this conversation explores why forcing people back to the office isn’t working—and what companies should be doing instead. The key idea? Offices need to become a magnet, not a mandate, offering real value that employees can’t get at home. Bob shares how Cisco is reimagining workspaces with a “me vs we” model, flipping traditional office design to prioritize collaboration over individual desks. Combined with data, AI, and smarter environments, the workplace is evolving into something far more intentional—and far more human. If you’re navigating hybrid work, managing teams, or thinking about the impact of AI on your business, this episode will completely reframe how you think about where—and how—work gets done. 🎯 Topics Covered Why AI will amplify human work—not replace it The shift from remote vs office to hybrid balance “Magnet vs mandate” and why return-to-office policies fail The “me vs we” workplace model and collaborative design Why human connection and in-person work still matter How AI is changing productivity and daily work tasks Designing offices that people actually want to go to The concept of “earning the commute” How data and AI are shaping the future workplace 🤝 Connect with Host & Guest Ryan Alford (Host) Website: https://ryanisright.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanalford Listen to Right About Now: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/right-about-now-with-ryan-alford/id1562875066 Bob Cicero (Cisco) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-cicero Company: https://www.cisco.com Learn More About Cisco Workplace Innovation: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collaboration/index.html

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 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 is what's actually going to happen over time? This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes.

You ready to start snapping next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now. Companies are still trying to figure out what to do with the office. Bring 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's certainly corporations here.

that have had the same challenges 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, I can't believe six years ago. You think about it. Everyone went home for two years and habits formed and lifestyles were formed. And how do you put that genie back in the bottle to effectively get people back to the office?

And 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 to all interface with. And how do you solve that problem and people really wanting 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 office standpoint, RTO standpoint, mandates haven't worked. And so what we've seen is is that people want to go to places that. 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. We do remote still, but it's a hybrid. I mean, I'm a small business owner and have a handful of people that work for me. So it's not the same as 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 did it that way. It actually is important. That's been something of 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 is that 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 to solve problems, to brainstorm, to 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, 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 have you seen from senior leaders as far as the general consensus around these things? It's easy maybe to go, well, the older guys just want 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. What 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 it the apprentice-based model of work. Someone doesn't become a great lawyer by sitting behind a screen. It's an apprentice model. An associate works with a partner 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. 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 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 the organization, but also cater to what people want.

You talked about that genie coming out of the bottle. The genie's out. You got to cater to what people want. But at 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 going to come together more because that's really what's going to happen when the standpoint of some of the broke tasks and all those are the pieces that you think about on a 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 is what's actually going to happen over time? We're on like a wavelength here. You're like reading my brain.

Where 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 they were more conducive to that. The humans are needed to sort of get in the room and have some ingenuity and some creativity together. 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 in really thinking through an issue that the machine might not be able to do or provide some creative thought to come together. But to your point of tasks that you did were done at home, is the digital work are 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 in our history is dot com.

boom, and we were wiring the world for the internet. And then we were catering to employees that wanted to work remote many, many years ago, and then the pandemic hit. In 2019, we actually came together as a group and as part of that group inside the 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. Started that effort in 2019. Pandemic hit in March of 2020. Gave us a lot of time to think as we were sort of stalled 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. A lot of times it's number two costs. And 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? re-draft the market, our space. And then now from a customer standpoint, customers, it's really interesting to see, you think about real estate in general, it's long tail. It's a long time to make decisions. And you think about most corporate leases, 10, 15, 20 years, options, et cetera. The industry doesn't move fast, but it's being forced to move fast in terms of what's actually

changing. Also work with customers and 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 and 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 or a Penn 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 a telling. But then you had a group of their spaces that were really for collaborative moments, for the we side of the world. You think about the me is focus. We is the collaborative space. We took that approach and we flipped it. We used to do 30 percent of we in seven, 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 a room as an example. With the technology, it happens to be powered by invidia 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 it? 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, et cetera. 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 and 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 as that long tail. That's why we started this five years ago. I love talking to smart people. Highly intelligent people, breaking down complex things into actually simple ways. The me-wee 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, dang, I get it to you, the me and the Wii. I envisioned the floor plan with Ws 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 used to 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, that old adage of there's no I in 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 who 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 plight? platform a choice on the meeting side. Could be WebEx, could be Zoom, it could be teams, etc. They're sitting at your desk on meetings with people that are on the same floor. Why are we doing that? You point it to their meeting space. One is they don't have enough Wii space. You go into their Wii 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. At the end of day, people are humans-like patterns in terms of how we work. And every single day, you're programmed to wake up and you might get a cup of coffee and have some eggs or whatever your morning routine is,

work out, et cetera. 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 laptop as they're on the same meeting. And everyone has speakers muted. And maybe one person has a speaker's 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 to 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 we because that's the reality of the world. It is about we. It always was tech last. It's like you designed it. Architecture. Pain 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 a Ethernet cord underneath the tape. It always came last. The industry of technology has 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, more cost effective.

You build it. All these pieces need to work. And 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 spade the spade. You've got leadership that fills a certain way. You've got middle management that fills a certain way.

You've 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 at Cisco. Our CEO, Chuck, believes it's space as a magnet and not a mandate. So how do you make it so space is a magnet? Fundamental difference shift on the 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 one, it's not a point in time. You 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 setup 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 that says, 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-infused space where people, people just come in and it just works. And it's everywhere. It permeates the entire space. People can roam about 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, you know, people have amenitized their spaces. When you think about landlords of monetized 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. I need to take friction out of the workday 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. 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 of Cisco. 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 everybody listens to my show knows 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, damn it. 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's history of the world changing this to make it conducive for people to want to go, but also to recognize that is adding value to the job that they do, which is I think a lot of what we've been talking about. But then I'll do the other day, hey, you got to roll up your sleeves and work, baby. That's just me being direct, Bob. 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, we're like, yeah, maybe it's a big change 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 your But we had to change an industry that moves very slow. And this radical transformation that we did as an organization was people looked at us and said, 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 an 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. that you can make the work more enjoyable for individuals depending on the space that they're in. It's why do they 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.

We think through that. It's yes, at some point, it's you redirect. Get back to work. Sure. But also, when you get there, you got to feel good about it, not just the work that you're doing, but also the space that you're occupied. Just no nap pods, Bob. No nap pods. We have no nap pods. That's where it cuts off from me. I'm like, come on. You know, you take a break. Take a break. Take a break. We got a basketball goal in the back, Bob. We got Xbox, but no naps, no nap. Take a rest.

Ciesta, you know, five-minute mind ease. This can't handle the nap pods. I don't know if those still exist at 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. But it's the different types of spaces. and what we see is 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 in the kitchen, went into the living room, went in the back deck.

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.

We're seeing now is that we have, as an example, out of our Penn location, is 5,000 data points every second coming up. So we have this treasure trope of data to really influence design. Some of the things that you're thinking about is on the design side, if I have all this data, I mentioned five to six different seating settings a day. The mentioned 70, 30 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 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 there's a journey of AI. When we think about AI where it is today, data is informing language models or tools that are coming out in 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-walt 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 of the house of IT, the real estate side. All these agents are going to be consistently communicating together. That's where the industry is heading. But when 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, etc. And so you see like nanobanana and all those other models that are out there from like a Gemini perspective. And you can add texture and type, we'll type, all these other components. And it's, that's just going to accelerate. You think about the changes that's occurred since the first time you've logged in to maybe chat GPT 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, 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 fast. 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 doing 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. On LinkedIn, most active for that. As a 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 where it's 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. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.