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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.

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Scott Cohen founded Jaxon.AI in Boston to build deterministic, mathematically provable AI verification for insurance, financial services, defense, and life sciences. He got there through an Air Force project where the use case had to work—and where the variability of large language models wasn't sufficient.

In this episode: why LLMs are token predictors that return the highest-probability answer rather than the correct one, why asking the same question twice gets you two answers, and why retrieval-augmented generation and LLM-as-judge are probabilities stacked on probabilities. Scott's alternative is symbolic reasoning — rule engines where a thing either is or isn't. That approach is what DSAIL does.

Also: growing up in a family of inventors behind Sweetheart Cup and the flexi-straw, what training as a chef at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts taught him about mise en place and running a company, and the costliest hire he ever made — data scientists when he needed builders.

Guest: Scott Cohen, Founder and CEO, Jaxon.AI — jaxon.ai

Recorded 7 July 2026.

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In this special episode recorded at Optics and Photonics Days 2026 in Jyväskylä, Finland, we speak with:

• Tomi Salo — Kvanttinova

• Sesha Manuguri — Dispelix

• Byron Seabolt — Optikos

• Mikko Närhi — Coherent

• Sampo Härkönen — Business Tampere

• Julian Gallego Urrea — Horiba

Together, we explore the technologies quietly powering the future of optics, photonics, quantum systems, AR, and advanced manufacturing.

Our guests explain how Finland built one of the planet's most concentrated photonics ecosystems through patience and infrastructure, how quantum research connects to real market partners, and what it takes to solve the complex waveguide challenges for next-generation AR glasses.

We also discuss automated optical metrology for volume production, high-power industrial fiber lasers, regional talent engines for advanced chip design, and the precision measurement instruments like spectroscopy that underpin both academic research and quality control.

Whether you’re interested in optics, lasers, quantum technology, AR hardware, or Nordic deep tech innovation, this episode offers a practical look at the people and companies building the foundations of tomorrow’s technology.

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