Cisco has juggled its executive suite in a move that CEO Chuck Robbins said will bring “fresh perspectives” to the networking giant, which is coming off a rough fiscal quarter and plans to cut thousands of jobs.

The biggest move as Robbins naming Mark Patterson as Cisco’s chief strategy officer. Patterson is a 23-year Cisco veteran, most recently serving as Robbins’ chief of staff where he led corporate planning and cross-company initiatives.

Robbins wrote in a blog post that Patterson’s new position will have oversight of a newly fortified strategy office that includes corporate strategy, development and incubation efforts “to drive Cisco’s growth strategy through acquisitions, strategic partnerships, investments, co-development and innovation. This will help us move quickly to capture opportunities that better both our portfolio and our business. Bringing these teams together will also further align our organic and inorganic innovation efforts with our overall strategy with a laser focus on growth and simplicity.”

Patterson is replacing long-tenured Cisco executive Liz Centoni, who is moving from her current position as EVP, chief strategy officer and GM of applications to her new role as EVP and chief customer experience officer.

Robbins stated that Centoni in her new role will “leverage her rich technical expertise and passion for customers to accelerate customer success and adoption across our portfolio. She will apply new and emerging technologies, particularly AI [artificial intelligence], to better serve our customers and partners and deliver unparalleled experiences in new and innovative ways.”

Robbins also noted that Centoni for now will maintain oversight of Cisco’s observability portfolio, including its Full Stack Observability and Cisco AppDynamics operations. Those operations are in the process of being bolstered by Cisco’s pending $28 billion acquisition of Splunk.

Centoni will replace Alistair Wildman, who had led Cisco’s customer experience organization for the past year. Wildman will remain at Cisco in the near term as an advisor to Centoni before leaving the company. Wildman has been at Cisco for nearly six years, having previously served in executive roles at OnApp, VMware, Salesforce and Microsoft.

Cisco also named Thimaya Subaiya as its new EVP of operations. Robbins described Subaiya’s new charge to “evolve and implement our capabilities across Cisco – balancing innovation, simplicity and optimization to drive scale, expansion and growth. His ability to build relationships across large organizations, influence and understand stakeholders and bring them along to accelerate change will lead to greater efficiency, productivity and simplicity in our operations.”

Subaiya for the past year served as Cisco’s chief transformation officer, while previously serving as head of the vendor’s customer experience organization.

Robbins touted the moves as bringing necessary change to Cisco’s leadership.

“I have no doubt that these three leaders will bring fresh perspectives and innovative thinking to their new roles to accelerate what’s going well and identify and adjust where changes are needed,” Robbins wrote. “Change is certainly not new to Cisco as we have fundamentally revamped our business model, let go of outdated legacies and are always looking at how we evolve to best serve the needs of our customers.”

That message mirrored Cisco’s most recent financial reporting, which included a 9% drop in product revenues. That includes a more significant 12% drop in its networking business.

Cisco also reported that service provider and cloud market revenues were down 40%, enterprise was down 6% and the public sector declined by 5% year over year. Geographically, sales were down 10% in the Americas, down 8% in EMEA and down 27% in Asia-Pacific.

Robbins told investors during the earnings call that Cisco was being operationally cautious in the near term due to continued customer uncertainty.

“In terms of the macro environment, we are seeing a greater degree of caution and scrutiny of deals given the high level of uncertainty,” Robbins said. “As we're hearing this from our customers, it's leading us to be more cautious with our forecast and expectations.”

That caution also drove Cisco’s to move on cutting 5% of its workforce, which is around 4,000 total jobs. Analysts tied part of that move to Cisco being challenged to better integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its operations.

“Cisco is a great company that has a lot of AI but still is not able to make the transition with the implementations and integrations as quickly,” Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, said during a podcast on Cisco’s latest earnings. “And it needs to reduce its cost to make sure it can deliver on its promise to its shareholders, which is always a very tough predicament to be in.”