Send us Fan Mail

Building innovation inside a giant company sounds like a contradiction until you hear how it actually gets done. We sit down with Jason W. Gallo, Vice President of Cisco’s Partner Go-to-Market Acceleration, to trace the path from Brooklyn Tech roots and an engineering mindset to leading transformation across one of the world’s biggest partner ecosystems. Along the way, we get honest about what changes when you climb the ladder: the job stops being “having the answer” and becomes knowing when to let go, delegate, and shape culture without crushing the team’s creativity.

We also dig into the Cisco 360 partner program and why it qualifies as a true corporate maverick move. When you work with about 35,000 channel partners and most revenue flows through the channel, changing governance, incentives, and operating rhythms is not a small tweak. Jason explains why Cisco chose to co-design the new program with partners, even announcing changes before everything was fully finished, and what that kind of openness demands from leaders and from partners who want to stay relevant.

Then we take on the AI question everyone is asking: elimination or opportunity? Jason’s take is direct, practical, and a little uncomfortable. AI may not fully replace humans, but people who use AI well will replace those who don’t. He shares how reskilling looks in the real world, why “playing with ChatGPT” is not the same as understanding AI, and how he used Claude to build and publish a simple app to GitHub after not coding for 20 years.

If you care about partner strategy, go-to-market execution, AI reskilling, or leadership growth in tech, this conversation will give you frameworks you can use immediately. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the one skill you’re committing to build next.

Support the show