PREMIUM Project 2026-2027: CISCO

The Project:

AI is reshaping how organisations work, collaborate, and create value. 

At Cisco, we build the technology that powers this shift, and we already use AI across our work every day. Our project management organisation in Germany delivers complex technology projects for customers across the country, and our ambition goes further: to become truly AI native.

The Challenge we need your help with: 
Becoming AI native means more than just using AI tools. It means rethinking how work is designed from the ground up, with AI as a natural part of how teams plan, collaborate, and deliver. It also means understanding how roles, skills, and ways of working evolve along the way, so that people remain at the centre.

As a PREMIUM student team, you will explore what an AI-native project organisation looks like and how to get there. You will translate your insights into practical strategies we can pilot with our teams, working closely with project managers and stakeholders, presenting your findings to senior audiences, and seeing your recommendations shape how we move forward. 

This project offers you the chance to work at the intersection of technology, people, and change.

For Cisco, the project offers a fresh, outside perspective on what becoming AI native means for the way we work and deliver value to our customers. It can help us shape this transformation in a thoughtful, people-centered way rather than one driven by technology alone and ensure our teams are prepared for how their roles will evolve. 

Your findings will inform how we redesign our ways of working, support our teams, and build new skills, helping us focus our efforts where they create the most value. Promising ideas can be piloted with selected teams, refined based on their experience, and scaled across the organisation where they prove successful. Beyond our own team, we intend to share the results with colleagues across Cisco so that the learnings can benefit a wider community working on similar questions.
 

The Client:

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era—and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.