Cisco adjusts partner enablement strategy to ease ‘stressful’ speed of AI

“[The] speed is one that I wouldn’t say everyone’s accustomed to, but our goal, just like with our employees, is to ensure that partners have access to the capabilities, tools, assets that they need to go out and be successful,” says Alex Pujols, PhD, CTO and VP Solutions Engineering at Cisco.

Based off constant feedback, Cisco has adjusted its enablement strategy to help partners be more consistent with training and keep pace with the rapid changes of AI.

‘Live’ training will also count towards the Partner Value Index (PVI) from the second half of FY27, announced Tim Coogan, Cisco’s Senior Vice President, Global Partner Sales at the Cisco Partner Summit 2026. The PVI is a way to measure partners’ contributions based on the unique value their role brings to customers.

“The moment-in-time training doesn’t work anymore,” said Alex Pujols, PhD, CTO and VP Solutions Engineering at Cisco. “You can’t train somebody in Q1 and then [say] we’re gonna retrain them in Q3. It doesn’t make sense — it has to be consistent.”

Industry discussions as well as market opportunities that the vendor has come across aligned with the theory and “feeds that same model” that determines what people needed to train on, making the training process a hyper-personalized one for partners.

“We're also aggressively training our internal sellers,” he said. “The transitions are happening [and] they’re moving fast.

“I would give us a ‘B’ — we’ve got some things we can do to certainly improve, but this isn't necessarily a Cisco issue. The entire industry is moving at this speed and it's pretty interesting [as] it’s creating a lot of opportunities [and] stress.”

What to expect in FY27

In a keynote rounding up the vendor’s plans for FY27, Coogan shared what partners can expect from its updated enablement strategy.

“This year, our enablement is built around people,” he said.

For instance, AI infrastructure and Supermicro training is set to open next week, following Cisco’s strategic partnership to deliver joint rack-scale infrastructure. Account managers can look forward to hands-on workshops for this in Q2.

Additionally, training for account managers and pre-sales for secure networking specialization was launched this week, with Cisco Cloud Control demos ‘live’ on dCloud.

In FY26, partners ran more than 230,000 demos on dCloud. Coogan hopes to see that number continue to rise in the coming year.

“We built everything here so that you can act the day you leave Partner Summit,” he said. “Three new black belts with more coming each and every day. Go-to-market kits are ready for every play, and success camp sessions and workshops will help you build your practice and run demand chain.”

In a separate keynote, Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s EVP of Global Sales and Chief Sales Officer announced that they will add an extra day of training at Cisco Connect, where partners can expect the same session offered to the vendor’s internal sellers.

“[The] speed [of AI] is one that I wouldn’t say everyone’s accustomed to, but at the end of the day, our goal, just like with our employees, is to ensure that our partners have access to the capabilities, tools, assets that they need to go out and be successful,” said Pujols.

“When we don’t give it to them, they’re very vocal about it, so we know and we make adjustments.”

Nurhuda Syed is reporting from Cisco Partner Summit in Vancouver.