Attention Is the Scarce Resource, Not Creativity in the Age of AI with Steve Clayton

**Steve Clayton** (0:00)
Take your phone and switch it into airplane mode, and see how much you can do on your phone. Very little. You can use the calculator, but you can't use an AI model, you can't surf the web, you can't send messages. People get excited about GPUs and data centers and models and applications and devices. But sitting at the center of all of that is the network, and that's what Cisco is all about. So that's, our job is to help people understand the value of the network, and to realize that AI is as exciting as it is, it simply doesn't happen without the network.

**Bernard Leong** (0:31)
Welcome to Analyse Podcast, the premier podcast dedicated to dissecting the pulse of business technology and media globally. I'm Bernard Leong, and today we explore a different but critical layer of the AI conversation. Not just the models, but the infrastructure, trust and storytelling required for AI to scale inside enterprises. With me today is Steve Clayton, Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at Cisco. Steve previously spent more than 28 years at Microsoft, including as Chief Storyteller, helping shape the company's technology, narrative, culture, and executive communications.
During a major period of transformation at Cisco, he now leads communications as the company frames its role in networking, security, and AI. So Steve, welcome to the show.

**Steve Clayton** (1:27)
It's great to be with you, Bernard.

**Bernard Leong** (1:28)
Yeah. So I started the conversation, doing some background research on you. You spent more than 28 years in the tech industry, including as Chief Storyteller and then later as Vice President of Communication Strategy before becoming Cisco's Chief Communications Officer. So your career has involved translating complex technology into stories that employees, customers and even policy makers and markets to make it they can understand. So what did your journey teach you about making technology feel more human and what feels different at Cisco now in the AI era?

**Steve Clayton** (2:04)
Yeah.
I strongly believe that storytelling is a very human thing. It started with cavemen around campfires and once they invented fire, they had nothing else to do. They didn't have to keep the ferocious animals away. So they sat around campfires and started to tell each other stories.
We are biologically predisposed for stories. When we meet people, we tell them stories. We ask them about journeys that they've been on. We ask them what books they've read. We ask them what music they listen to. The language of humanity is stories. In the world of technology, we tend to get very excited about the technology. But the thing that I think is important is telling stories about the impact that technology has on people's lives. And that's what I spent a lot of time doing at Microsoft, and it's why I'm at Cisco, because I think there's a huge opportunity to help people understand not technology for the sake of technology, but what is the role of technology? What is the impact it can have on people's lives? How does it make our world better? And so that's why I think storytelling is and always will be incredibly important.

**Bernard Leong** (3:06)
Yes, especially now with stories being so important and for the AI debate itself. So I would get straight into the subject itself. So one way to frame the AI debate is that the first wave really focus a lot on model capability.
But the next wave will be about whether AI can be deployed safely, securely and at scale. So maybe one question I will start is, from Cisco's current vantage point, why does the public conversation still overindex on models and underindex on infrastructure? I mean, every other week, we have a lot of announcements on AI models, but we don't hear a lot on the infrastructure side.

**Steve Clayton** (3:47)
Yeah, I think when we come to a city, so here I am visiting Singapore, and when I get here, I'm more interested in what restaurant should I go to? What bar should I go to? Which hotel should I stay in? But I don't think about how am I going to get there. I'm going to get there on the roads. I'm going to get there with transport, and that is the network, is sort of the analogy.
So in some ways, they're in our subconscious. We take them for granted, but nothing would happen without them. If there wasn't a road between the airport and the city center, then I wouldn't get to get to my hotel or get to stay in the restaurant. So I think we've got a similar sort of phenomena goes on with AI, and the media like to report on models and they like to report on the latest devices and the latest applications and the competition between the model makers.