Cisco do not have real ai strategy . Routers are routers. Even their ai factory is yet another box just with label nvidia on it . No major investment needed.
All that observability tooling around is only benefiting ai wave . They can vibe re-write everything .
At this point Cisco is a conglomerate that does everything and nothing. They own so many different verticals that even people working there don't really know what cisco fully does anymore.
But I agree though, this is an artificial stock pump because of the rush for picks and shovels.
The real question is did the hardware stores back in the day care that the miners were digging for gold?
As someone who was impacted by Cisco's first ever round of layoffs, I can say with confidence that your statement was also true 25 years ago.
Waiting for them to put AI into the Smart Licensing on my routers.
I guess when they said "insert token" they meant "insert quarter" and by "insert quarter" they meant "insert your entire fiscal quarter".