Career Growth Advice from Liz Centoni, Cisco EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer | Career Tips for Women in Technology
2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 137
Featuring Liz Centoni
Episode Title: #137 Cisco's EVP Liz Centoni Talks about Navigating AI and Leadership
Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Liz Centoni
Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there, my name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the 2B Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. 2B Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and a source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you. Encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.
Hi there. Today's guest proves that you can build a legacy and drive innovation without losing sight of people, purpose, or progress. I'm thrilled to welcome Liz Centoni to the show, Cisco's executive vice president and chief customer experience officer, where she leads a global team of over 20,000 employees. Her mission is to create personalized, predictive, and proactive experiences powered by AI. With nearly 25 years at Cisco, Liz has climbed the ranks, led transformative initiatives, and carved a path forward for women in tech. She's been a pivotal leader during the waves of change from cloud to security and now the importance of embracing AI. In addition to her executive role, she's found the time to be an active mentor and sponsor for underrepresented groups, including serving as Cisco's global executive sponsor for the women in science and engineering program. Liz, I mean, the topic couldn't be more timely with where you are in your career. Thank you so much for joining the show and being a guest here today.
Liz Centoni (Guest): I was really looking forward to this all week, Mary. So, thank you for having me.
Mary Killelea: Fantastic. So, I always like to start with your background so people can kind of see how you climbed from where you started to where you are today. If you wouldn't mind just giving us kind of that high level overview of your career path and then we'll go from there.
Liz Centoni: 25 years seems like a long time. Didn't plan for it all in the same company. I always thought, you know, especially early in my career, I'd have stints like a year or two years and they would be like little lily pads to the next one. Even though I think the path to tech was a little bit of a scenic route. I started in technology sales. I'm going to date myself when I say this. I used to sell mainframes and minis at that time. And then from there, I wandered into consumer products. I love that because I fell in love with the tangible side of it, right? You could go into a grocery store, you could touch it, you could see it on the shelves, and you get that instant gratification of I was part of that, you know? I have been known to be in the grocery store and moving stuff around so we get the best placement. So I have done that as well but I kept getting pulled back to tech and because when I think about the scale of the impact you can have at a global level is just huge and so 25 years at Cisco has been a combination of things. I'm in my 13th role I think. Yes. 13th role. Started off in network management, ran as an individual contributor, ran a few engineering groups, ran as GM five of our businesses including cloud compute, IoT, our service provider access, applications. While I was running the applications group, I also was the chief strategy officer. Led the acquisition of Splunk working with the teams here and for the last year I have been running all of customer experience. So instead of going somewhere else and finding the lily pads you know across multiple companies I'd say I found the lily pads here at Cisco.
Mary Killelea: That is so beautifully put because I used to work at Intel and you could literally if you couldn't find a career in Intel, you couldn't find it. You know, it's one of those great companies where you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself to try new experiences. Were you intentional in your journey on those lily pads? Then also as you kind of progressed in those different jobs, were you thinking about developing your leadership kind of I don't want to say personality but your style?
Liz Centoni: Yeah, it's I would say is I can't quite say I was intentional about it because if I look back at the 13 roles and I look back and say there was one role probably that I'd stayed in far too long because there was a time towards the end of it where it felt like I wasn't learning as much wasn't challenged as much. So I would say in the early part of my career it was just the opportunities that became available where I felt like hey to get that opportunity I've got to probably take some of the roles which were more turnarounds because nobody else wanted to do it. And so you know it was more of that than anything else. But later on, I would say a few years later, you know, the whole focus around having mentors and sponsors grew so significantly and having a network of advisors that, you know, whether it was a gentle nudge or a sharp elbow in the ribs to help connect to opportunities and help connect to you know, kind of roles. Then it had become a lot more intentional in terms of kind of the career moves from one role to the other. I always have a bit of paranoia that if I'm not learning then I'm falling behind. So moving from multiple domains to like you know I went from the computer domain to IoT to applications. I started off in service provider access before that in network management. There's a huge fear because you go from being the person who knows a lot to the newbie. But it also builds your capabilities around how you build teams where you're building people where you're bringing together people who have skills that are complimentary to you. You get more comfortable at knowing what you're really good at at what you were, what you're not good at and how you need to surround yourself with great people who know that. So it got a lot more I would say intentional around the career moves probably half a little a third or two thirds of the way at Cisco.
Mary Killelea: Something that I dealt with in my career is I made lateral moves versus sometimes promotional just based on the opportunity. How do you feel about lateral moves and women focusing on kind of general versus being an expert in one topic?
Liz Centoni: So, let's touch on the lateral moves first. I think with any choice that you make, I'm big on analytics or or the analysis of it. So I would say choosing wisely is something that starts with a little bit of self- introspection. That's usually hard because you start out with a blank sheet of paper and based on your feedback from others, you get to know what you're really good at and I can tell you it's hard, it's hard to do. It's easier said than done. And then what are the capabilities that you want to build and you know you have to be intentional about your career journey and that could be within a technology domain. It could be around, hey it's really around. I want to grow around not just that technology domain but I want to get breath across multiple domains and I want to be able to climb the ranks as a leader from a leadership standpoint that comes from within. I don't think anybody else can define that for you. So it's the story that you write and many times when I mentor folks and they say you know what do you think I should do next is more around I can guide you once you've done that introspection and that you know that comes over a period of time as you as you go from early in career to midcareer as well. So when a lateral move comes up, it has to line up with what's your goal at the end of the day. Is it about learning a new technology? Is it where you get to work with some of the people you're truly impressed with and you can learn from them? Is it around getting more leadership skills and so that then leads to another lily pad somewhere else? I do believe that being intentional and hence the choose wisely part comes into play. Even as I say choose wisely, on the lateral side, it's almost like sometimes you you take risk and you know I look when I look back probably many of the moves that I made that at that time just seemed risky, new domain, you know, kind of where you had to build back a product after it was on the down slide already. Those are the places I learned you know the most I would say. So in both of those I would say whether it is around staying in one technology domain or not I would say even if you decide that you're within a technology domain there's opportunities where continuous learning has to be a big part of it. So even within the domain itself, you know, how do you learn a lot more? Because if you're stovepiped within a domain, you have to ask yourself where are you growing? You know, how are you contributing? What's the impact that you can make? Because sometimes when you're a little bit stovepiped within a particular domain and you feel like there's not a lot of things and it's slow moving, you have this, you know, echo chamber view as well. So I would say there's not a right or wrong answer. Mary is the way I look at it, it's more around what are your goals and objectives and having being intentional about the paths that you've picked that move you there. And like you said, it could be lateral, it could be climbing the ladder, it could be a combination of both.
Mary Killelea: I love those insights. You mentioned earlier mentors and sponsors that you've had in your career and you mentor other women as well. What advice do you have for women seeking mentors or sponsors?
Liz Centoni: That introspection part is really really important is around you know I I start with what am I seeking to know more? what am I seeking to you know it could be around skills like wow I like the way that she presents I love that how you know how she's brought in the technical depth but is able to simplify it for the audience itself and then where's the technical audience she goes into a lot more details how do we how does she do that so that's an example of where you've looked at you know kind of what what are you really good at what do you want to add and you I would say you have to be intentional about picking mentors as well like what how are the mentors going to help you? It could be around a particular technology domain. It could be other skills that they have. It could be the connections that they have as well. So have an objective before you just kind of reach out and then when you reach outline why you're reaching out and what are the things and you know the person may come back and say hey actually I'm not that great at these things but let me talk to you about this other person it could be or yep actually I'd love to but you know here's the here are the things around where the t the whole world framework within in which we work. Many times I see people come in with just a very broad I want to be mentored. I'd say you have to do some homework upfront on what you're seeking and who are you seeking it from?
Mary Killelea: That's excellent advice. What's something that surprised you about the path to executive leadership that you didn't expect when starting out?
Liz Centoni: When I think about this is I think the path to leadership there is a there's a few things I'll start with the classic you know as a woman in tech like the challenges you face around being seen being heard and being taken seriously right so I faced all of that by the way the classic one that every woman in tech knows where you suggest an idea and have it ignored only need to hear a man say the exact same thing a bit later and suddenly the it's like the heavens open up and the rays of glory and brilliance shine upon him. I used to think that geez I think I was not clear enough or not confident enough in terms of what I said and it took me a long time to realize that it was not about how I was saying it. It was who was hearing it and learning to navigate that without losing my authenticity. That took some time. It was tough, but that took some time. The other one I would say was having to walk this tight rope between being seen as too aggressive or not assertive enough. Like if I speak up firmly, it's like ooh intimidating or difficult or emotional. So finding a way without being labeled, I felt like it was a little bit trial and error. And candidly, I would say I'm still calibrating some of that even today.
Mary Killelea: I mean, I'm getting goosebumps because literally what you're talking about is so relevant for women today. And it's fantastic to hear women at your level be transparent about this actually happening and how you're helping demonstrate women can do it. So thank you for that. What do you believe has helped you build trust as you've led such a large organization?
Liz Centoni: So my team's overall team is about 21,000 people and so I would say that at that scale you cannot be everywhere at once. So authenticity becomes everything, right? People need to know what you stand for and trust that you will show up the same way whether you're talking to the board or you're talking to like the newest member, the newest engineer on the team. Building trust in me I do think it starts with having a unified vision and a clear sense of purpose with a really concrete plan to get there. For me, it's important that every one of our team members has a clear line of sight around the work that they're doing. How does it support our strategy and priorities? Every month I have what we call a monthly customer experiencing. We had one this morning and you know people who join live can do so others will listen to it. They listen to a recording of it. I always start with the priorities because I want to get to a point where every team member can repeat that because what this approach does is it resonates around what our priorities are. It resonates with our vision of putting the customer at the center of everything we do. It creates that sense of purpose. It guides our strategic decision. It helps our teams align. It helps our partners align and helps our customers understand our mission. So that is important in terms of trust. The other thing I do is I do spend time listening. I read messages from anyone and everyone. I may have missed a few here and there. I do think that empathy and emotional intelligence help me read between the lines, right? Because I do think that if you want to trust that strategic thinking has to come with a human heart. It has to be laser focused as well, right? So, you know, so these are all the things it's like being consistent. For me, it's important that there needs to be accountability paired with empowerment. We have a clear vision and strategy. We know what needs to be done. We're executing on it together with Fury. So, it's a whole host of these things, Mary. It's not just one particular thing. It's that consistency. It's that accountability, empowerment, the continuous learning path, the empathy, the emotional intelligence, the communication that you do, the way you show up, and the consistency in how you show up. You don't massage the message. People hear who you are and what you stand for, and they trust that you'll show up the same way every time.
Mary Kilelea: I might be a little biased, but I think women are so good at emotional intelligence and I think it's just innate in who we are. So you've worked in emerging technologies, cloud, security, and now AI. How do you stay focused on the tech at the helm of what you're trying to achieve when there's such a fast pace of innovation?
Liz Centoni: Learning has always been part of who I am. So my career has been shaped by experiences leading businesses within Cisco that were emerging tech technologies like they had their hype cycle. When I came into IoT, we were talking about a trillion dollar market, you know, talk about a hype cycle on that. And so it represents this huge, you know, kind of challenge for leaders to do kind of balance, hey, there's excitement and expectations with real world challenges around investment and, you know, unmet promises and organizational fatigue. But can I tell you that with AI, I feel like this is something I'm learning every single day. And every single day I feel dumb because the pace at which it's moving, I feel like I can't keep up. But what keeps me grounded is keeping the customers at the center of everything. Like if I look at, you know, we in customer experience, we were doing AI and automation especially predictive for quite some time, right? That's the way we've we were able to automate so much in customer support like 60% of our 1.67 six seven million trouble tickets are automated using AI right so that but with generative AI and aentic especially the opportunity is huge it's like CX is the biggest playground for it but the technology and the conversations are way ahead of where our customers are in terms of deploying it so I I keep myself grounded by keeping our customers at the center of everything because the tech may be moving at light speed but our customers are a little bit more slower some faster than the other and with every technology I'm always asking how does this solve like a real problem for our customers whether it's today or even a problem they don't even know that exists in the future so what's the use case and I do think that that helps cut through some of the noise the second thing is I am super fortunate where I have a lot of smart people that I can go to and they help me understand what's worth paying attention to like I I always ask people what do you listen to which podcast who are you you know who are you following what are the courses out there that you take I am taking courses on a regular basis and so I curate a set I get help from others to even curate a set of things that where I have made it a requirement on myself that on my weekdays I will spend at least an hour listening to something new, looking up something new. On the weekend, I actually take classes because the way I look at it is my job is not to be the smartest person in the room about every technology. My job is really to connect the dots between what's possible and what our customers need.
Mary Killelea: I love that. The growth mindset has never been more prevalent or no more important. Help me understand. You mentioned agentic AI. How should I understand it in layman terms?
Liz Centoni: So, you know how everyone's throwing around agentic AI and I've read about this before as well. It's like magic. Here's the way I think about it. My mental model is around super simple like it's AI that can take action not just give you answers like what we had before with chat bots and I look at this around you know how do I compute this by myself right if I look at traditional AI and customer support our teams might are it might be able to tell you our chatbots like can tell you like hey I can see your network is down here are the three steps to try to troubleshoot the issue because it's using a very good digitized knowledge base from like 40 years of of how we've looked how we've seen all of these issues and we've addressed them before. So it's you who leverages that to provide steps on how to help you find the root cause in the issue. Right? So it's very reactive. It's focused on break fixes. Agentic systems to me begins to start learning your environment like every customer in a way that's much more deeper than a human can do because it's analyzing all your historical data. It's if we can get real-time telemetry from customers, it's consuming that. It's looking at all the interaction patterns and the feedback loops and then can actually anticipate that potential issue in terms of a network down in the environment before it even impacts the customer and then provides recommendations and take actions to address it before the operations team even knows there's a problem. So to me that's like the vision of agentic systems. Now mind you with everything that we do we always have humans in the loop. There's not as much as we have a support agent today, an adoption agent or a renewals agent. There's always a human in the loop because we completely believe that where we're going is where auto agent tech AI helps us with autonomous tasks, not the full workflow. And so it's more around you know how do we deliver these proactive predictive h you know very personalized very personalized experiences for our our customers and why in CX because in CX you have like it's very people intensive it's lots of repeatable workflows so very repetitive and lots of data right so so this is where this is how you know from traditional to where we are with Aventic. It gives us the opportunity to solve some of these problems that we've been circling around for multiple years. Problems that I call boring problems. They're not glamorous. You don't hear a lot of people talking about that, but they're boring problems that my customers are faced with every day.
Mary Killelea: I thank you for explaining that. That definitely helped kind of connect the dots there for me. I love the fact that you said the human element still remains. What do you tell people who fear that AI is going to take over their job, their, you know, lives?
Liz Centoni: Yeah. when I think about like we've gone through automation since I don't know the first industrial revolution and jobs have changed they have it's not the same kind of jobs etc so do I have I have healthy concerns they're not paralyzing fears and here's the way I look at it what is it doing for us internally as part of working in a large company we have taken for granted that oh it's there's going to be friction in terms of working you know there's a bunch of cognitive load you've got to spend a lot of time analyzing data creating proposals I have a renewals team they spend 40% of their time doing this which means it's 40% of the time they're not spending with customers we have a renewals agents that's looking at how do we you know autonomously take some of those tasks and It still needs the human to validate it. So the human is always in the loop. But it takes away the cognitive load from what they have to do because I'd like them to, you know, where we digitize a customer's intent so they know what the customer bought our capabilities for. I'd like them to spend more time with their customers to ensure that the adoption team is also working closely in terms of getting that technology adopted so our customers get time to value and then they'll do the renewal. In this case, I'm trying to create more capacity. I am not trying to take away the jobs. I'm looking at and going there's a portion of the customers that we're not covering today. I'm not planning on adding any headcount to the team, but I want to be able to reduce the cycle time and get us to cover more customers. Will some of the roles that we're doing morph? Absolutely. Because some of the, you know, lower complexity things that our my teams are doing, I would love for that to be where an agent is helping doing that in the background. Whether that agent is triggered by humans or whether that agent is triggered by events and my team focuses more on some of the much more complex cases today and because if I ask my team hey how much time is re of your time is really spent with problem solving and being creative versus doing written work I would like to increase the amount of time that they spend on the creative and more problem solving. So yes, some of the ways in terms of how we do our jobs and where we focus will absolutely change. It'll be more automation, more efficient, reduce the cycle time, create more capacity, but it's where I'm looking at and going I can cover more with the team that I have. So for the teams who are looking to ask me for more resources, I come back and go, how can some of the agents that we're doing help without adding more people?
Mary Killelea: I love that. I'm huge as a small business owner, I'm so excited about AI and what it can do and how it can accelerate the growth of my business. What excites you most about AI?
Liz Centoni: I would say if I can do it it goes back to what I said just a few minutes ago is we can solve problems that we've been circling around for ages, problems that have frustrated my customers for decades. You know config issues anyone who's been in networking will go oh yep config issues you know they are just something you just go just live with right out of 1.67 million support cases that we have 25% are related to config issues. I would like to go from what we call config chaos to config confidence. I mean that's going to be a huge again boring problem with a huge impact in terms of people not having to deal with that and you know you improve the confidence of your customers. I also what excites me especially is it gives us the opportunity to fundamentally change the nature of how we interact with our customers. It goes back to what I said earlier where where we're anticipating not just reacting where we can do like this radical personalization whether it's a customer who's adopting our technology the way we're supporting them and we can do it not just for 10 or hundred or thousands we can do it for hundreds of thousands of customers. So at scale and where I'd say I can unleash my team's brilliance by reducing that friction in what they've just kind of gone along with in doing their jobs every day. So that's what excites me.
Mary Killelea: We only have a few more questions. I could talk to you all day about AI and just your intelligence and viewpoint on it. So I want to be respectful of your time. When you reflect back on your career, what are you most proud of?
Liz Centoni: Ah, so you got to pick one thing, huh? I'm most proud of the sustainable impact I've created. I look at it as a change that extends well beyond my time, my tenure in that role. I've been part of building multiple businesses that have continued to thrive long after I've left. And candidly, some of my proudest moments have come from fights I had to pick. They were the initiatives that decision makers wanted to kill. And I felt like I could see what others could not. I persisted when it would have been easier to give up. And those loss causes that they called have become some of our biggest competitive advantages that are driving value today.
Mary Killelea: That's fantastic. What does to be bolder mean to you?
Liz Centoni: To be bolder to me has always been about authentic courage, having the confidence to bring who I am to every situation and the conviction to act on what I believe is right. And so when I feel like I'm bolder personally, whether that's speaking up, taking up space, being authentically me, it makes me a better leader as well for my team. And when I am bolder, like taking the risk, fighting for my vision, I feel like that in turn builds confidence and carries into every aspect of my life. And over the last year and a half, I've been thinking about this more and more. And this is newer to me. If you asked me this probably, you know, 18 months ago, it wouldn't have come up. I feel like at its core being bolder is about owning my agency, owning my power, choosing my response rather than reacting. And why did I come upon this? About 18 months ago, I was talking to a coach of mine and she mentioned Victor Frankle and I love Victor Frankle's insight that between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is the power to choose our response and in our response lies our freedom and our growth. And being bolder means to me is expanding that space, taking ownership for my choices and recognizing that I always have agency every single time.
Mary Killelea: Liz, it has been amazing to have you here. I appreciate you taking the time to share your knowledge and your journey with everyone. So, thank you so much.
Liz Centoni: Thank you, Mary. This was so much fun. I really loved it.
Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number 2 little bbolder.com.