Cisco held its annual ‘WebexOne’ showcase event featuring a plethora of new and upcoming features across its foundational Cisco Webex platform.
The introductions reflect the company’s commitment to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) broadly and support its mantra of “everything we do is in the service of experience.”
On the surface, the WebexOne announcements appear to be wide-ranging. Deeper reflection on them makes it clear that AI is fundamental to Cisco. AI permeates products across the portfolio largely in the form of the Cisco Webex AI Assistant.
Cisco goes full stack
AI resonates in Cisco’s corporate structure, helping the company deliver what it calls ‘full stack collaboration’ through a combination of collaboration, networking, security, and observability that populate a new product organisation unveiled in August 2024. Moreover, AI influences the go-to-market strategy of the new organisation as well, underpinning each of the three major businesses the company now operates in: powering AI-ready data centres; future-proofed workplaces powered by a core set of collaboration technologies; and digital resilience that reflects how adeptly a committed digital organisation rebounds from a network outage.
Cisco sees collaboration as a key enabler for future-proofing workplaces that involves reimagining customer experience, reimagining workspace devices, and reimagining work itself.
Following is a discussion of a sample of features unveiled at the event that bears this out.
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By GlobalDataCustomer satisfaction is declining
Cisco research shows that despite increased investments by organisations, customer satisfaction is declining. Thus, the company has made a priority of building its portfolio of tools that support the customer experience. A key example is the Cisco Webex AI Agent, which grabs attention for how closely it mimics a live agent. It features a natural sounding voice that is nearly indistinguishable from a human, is remarkable for its flexibility to pivot mid-conversation from one topic to the next, recognises strict limits of what it can answer, and can execute tasks on a customer’s behalf. Cisco Webex AI Agent will be generally available for cloud customers in Q1 2025; in Q2 2025, a trial for premises customers will launch.
Device experience
The prominence Cisco has placed on the device experience is a key differentiator. The overarching theme of the company’s device strategy is to drive inclusive experiences and support reimagined office designs that are meeting-oriented and let workers communicate and collaborate from anywhere. One such example is Cisco Spatial Meetings. It uses a stereoscopic view captured by the dual-camera system of the Cisco Room Bar Pro and enhanced with spatial computing to deliver a meeting experience where people and objects appear in 3-D lifelike realism. Cisco Spatial Meetings will be available in Q1 CY2025.
Cisco Workspace Designer
How work gets done is often influenced by the physical environment where work is performed. Cisco Workspace Designer is an interactive configurator built to help organisations design and customise their workspaces. The online tool provides 3-D images of meeting rooms ranging in size from small to very large and allows users to tinker with room elements such as dimensions, tables, chairs, screens, video devices and peripherals until the configuration meets their liking. Cisco Workspace Designer is available now.
Cisco has long been a leader in the use of AI, but the WebexOne 2024 event made it clear that the association has deepened. Cisco has done a commendable job of rapidly forming an arsenal of compelling AI capabilities. The breadth of product categories that AI touches and the influence that AI has had on the company’s organisational structure and operations are key differentiators.
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