India, June 29 -- There is a sentence that appears in almost every major tech layoff in 2026. It goes something like this: we are investing heavily in AI, and to do that, we need to restructure. Cisco's version of that sentence came from CEO Chuck Robbins in May, when he told employees the company needed to make "hard decisions, about where we invest, how we're organised, and how our cost structure reflects the opportunity in front of us."

The opportunity, in Cisco's case, is AI networking infrastructure. The hard decision, in California's case, is 471 jobs.

According to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification letters filed with the California Employment Development Department, public regulatory documents that California law requi...