Cisco has a few things to say about how AI agents impact the future of work. Rightfully so, the company serves 95% of Fortune 500 companies and has a 36% market share in enterprise networking infrastructure. The leadership team at WebexOne spoke with one unified voice about their focus on enabling excellent user experiences, strategy to deliver open platforms, and pragmatic approach to AI agents.

Let me first overly simplify Cisco Webex’s business. On one side is Webex Suite, a platform that competes with Microsoft Teams and Zoom. The other side focuses on customer experience, including Cloud Contact Center and CPaaS, their communication platform for automating customer journeys. Underpinning these platforms are their devices for conference rooms and desks.

One open and flexible platform.

At WebexOne, Cisco showcased its open collaboration platform coupled with enterprise partnerships to meet customers where they are today. They made several key announcements:

• A partnership with Zoom to use Webex’s conference room technology, including the Room Bar Pro, Room Vision PTZ, and the Ceiling Microphone Pro.
• A partnership with Salesforce to integrate its CRM with Cisco’s customer experience platforms.
• Robust security on Cisco Devices using MDEP, the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, when running the Microsoft Teams Rooms experience.
• Webex Suite integrations with Amazon Q index, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Salesforce for AI-enabled workflow automation.

Three industry use cases for Cisco Webex innovations

Rather than just sharing all of the great innovations, let me put them into context with some real-world opportunities

Pragmatic AI agents in financial services

Working in financial services often involves spending a significant amount of time in meetings. Even a Director’s calendar looks like artwork with overlapping meetings, and they don’t have an executive assistant to help them manage conflicts. When a meeting’s done, they often rely on a project manager to capture notes, record tasks in the appropriate tools, and schedule any follow-up meetings.

That was the world before AI. Webex live demoed five pragmatic AI agents that solve every-hour problems in any company that requires collaboration. Notetaker Agent captures notes while the Polling Agent automatically suggests questions to engage participants. While competing AI tools may capture action items, Task Agent takes it a step further and can open tickets in tools like Jira. Need a follow-up? Scheduler recognizes it, reviews calendars, and can schedule the meetings.

What impressed me the most was that the UX looked natural, providing suggestions to the meeting organizer and letting them decide which to act on.

Innovations for training rooms and classrooms

In my report from last year’s WebexOne, I was impressed with the Cisco Ceiling Microphone Pro, which seemed to be every meeting leader’s savior for audio dead spots. This year, an enhancement allows creating quiet zones, so that meeting participants can block audio from side conversations or conduct meetings in open areas without noise flooding in.

The more significant innovations were Cinematic meetings coupled with a new AI Director. These two technologies focus on multiple views of meeting participants, with one cropped to show the full room and another focusing on the speaker. The real AI magic occurs when the speaker is in motion, and the AI has the camera follow them around the room.

For those of us teaching in classrooms or running workshops, this capability represents a significant advancement in hybrid classrooms and training rooms.

Au revoir, retail’s broken customer service chatbots

I’ve written several times about the promising opportunities for using AI agents in customer service functions and call centers. We all know what broken looks like – rules-driven chatbots that provide generic responses that don’t address our issues. Call center managers want higher deflection rates when using self-service capabilities and having AI agents address the easy problems. That will open up opportunities for people to solve the more gnarly issues.

There’s an opportunity to aim for and deliver higher goals, especially in the retail sector. AI Agents connected to CRMs open up opportunities to offer discounts to the right customers and well-chosen upsells at the right time.

Webex AI Quality Management is a new tool that evaluates the performance of human and AI agents. Using simple dashboards, managers can visualize and take action on underperforming areas, and the AI provides personalized recommendations. Examples include when agents should slow down and listen more, as well as sentiment analysis to suggest more empathetic responses. However, my favorite demo demonstrated real contextual analysis of an agent’s knowledge weak spots and where to focus learning opportunities.

The AI Canvas for IT collaboration

I have a soft spot for everyone working in IT ops, who are often in the line of fire when issues arise. Major incidents require bringing too many experts into war rooms, each looking at tech-specific screens to help pinpoint issues. When an issue impacts only one or a few people, it’s extremely challenging to trace through the full experience and identify the root cause of their poor experience.

Digital Trailblazer readers will recall my stories from one IT Ops war room, where I joined the team in an effort to diagnose performance issues in an outbound call center. Splunk was the saving tool, but it took weeks of testing to validate the root cause of the issue.

Cisco has stepped into the AIOps space – now upgraded to AgenticOps, with Cisco AI Canvas, a shared, intelligent workspace that brings real-time telemetry, AI insights, and team collaboration into one view.

What I love about Cisco AI Canvas is its form factor. The IT service desk agent responding to an issue starts with a blank slate, then teams up with an AI agent to find relevant information. Reports and configurations are added to the canvas, and a collaboration tool allows the service desk agent to invite experts to participate as needed. As they join, they all receive access to the same canvas – one unifying screen – to participate in identifying the cause and resolving the issue.

AI Agents beyond productivity: Value, capabilities, and transformation

In my search for real business value and digital transformation from genAI that goes beyond productivity improvements, I seek opportunities that are new capability drivers. These AI agents help people perform actions that they probably couldn’t do at all before, or were so inefficient that they didn’t perform them effectively or consistently.

Webex is showcasing its design thinking skills in finding pragmatic ways for AI agents to be truly helpful to people. They offer key lessons to Digital Trailblazers investing in AI agents: (i) find pragmatic use cases, (ii) focus on the end-user experience, (iii) leverage integrations and partnerships to power the actions.