Cisco reported its first-quarter results on Thursday 12 November, and the numbers were big: revenue of $18.5 billion, up 24% on a year ago, and adjusted earnings of $1.40 a share, up 40% — its strongest growth in more than 15 years. The company also raised its full-year sales guidance to $74.8–$75.8 billion and lifted its expected AI infrastructure revenue from the big cloud companies to $9 billion for the year, more than double the roughly $4 billion it made from them last year.
That last number is the one that matters. Cisco does not sell chatbots. It sells the networking equipment — switches, cables and chips — that connects the data centres where AI runs. When that part of its business more than doubles in a year, it means the big cloud companies are building AI capacity as fast as they can, and they expect to keep doing it. Cisco’s chief executive, Chuck Robbins, called it “the very early stages of a multi-year networking supercycle”. Networking revenue rose 43% in the quarter.
Why this matters beyond the stock market
The AI story has spent two years being about chatbots and demos. Cisco’s results show where the money is actually going now: into the plumbing. The cloud companies — Google, Microsoft, Amazon and the rest — are spending billions on the hardware that lets AI answer questions at scale, because their customers are using it at scale.
That shift reaches small businesses faster than most people expect. Two years ago, a customer looking for a plumber, a web designer or a café searched on Google and read a list of links. Today, more and more of them ask an AI tool instead — “best plumber near me”, “who builds websites in Worcester” — and take the answer they are given. The companies building the infrastructure for those answers are the ones Cisco is selling to.
One honest note: Cisco’s own margins fell. Adjusted gross margin was 65.6%, down from 68.1% a year ago, because the memory chips used in AI hardware cost more. AI infrastructure is expensive to build, and those costs are being passed along the chain. The boom is real, but it is not free.
What a UK small business should do about it
You are not going to buy Cisco switches, and you do not need an AI chatbot on your website. What you do need is to be found when a customer asks an AI tool for a business like yours. Three things are worth doing now.
Check what AI tools say about you. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask for the best business in your trade in your town. If your business does not appear, or appears with wrong details, that is a problem worth fixing before it costs you work. Our free Visibility Audit shows whether AI tools cite you and whether you win AI answers, as well as where you rank on Google.
Make your website easy for AI to read. AI tools quote businesses with clear, well-structured pages: one page per service, plain words about what you do and where you work, real reviews, and information that is up to date. A site that is vague about its services is hard for Google to rank and hard for an AI tool to quote. This is the work our GEO services and AEO services cover — getting found in AI answers, not just on Google.
Use short video. AI search increasingly surfaces video, and a 60-second clip explaining what you do is cheap to make and easy for a customer to watch. It also gives AI tools something concrete to cite. Our AI video editing service turns a short recording into a finished video.
The point is not to chase every AI trend. It is that the way customers find businesses is changing, and the businesses that adapt early — clear pages, honest reviews, short video — are the ones that get found.
Frequently asked questions
Does Cisco spending billions on AI affect my small business?
Not directly — you are not buying its equipment. But it is a signal about where the world is going. The biggest companies on earth are spending billions because they expect AI to be how customers find things. For a small business, the practical effect is that search is changing: the customers who used to read a list of Google links are starting to ask AI tools instead, and the businesses that show up in those answers are the ones with clear websites and real reviews.
Before you spend anything, our free Visibility Audit shows where you rank on Google, whether AI tools like ChatGPT cite you, and whether you win AI answers — with what to fix first. Free, with no obligation.