MetriNote – Cisco Delivers New AI Capabilities and Devices at WebexOne

Author: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst What's the news? October 23, 2024 – Cisco has introduced a slew of new employee and customer experience innovations and products at its annual WebexOne conference. Employee experience engagement announcements include:

• Cisco Spatial Meetings, a software upgrade enabling any Cisco Room Bar Pro system to provide a virtual reality experience for Apple Vision Pro users
• Cisco Ceiling Microphone Pro offering the opportunity to replace complex ceiling microphone arrays with a device that uses AI to optimize capture of in-room meeting participant voice
• Workplace Designer to allow facilities managers to easily design and customize workspaces, with built-in knowledge of in room audio and video capabilities
• Smart Diagnostics in Control Hub to improve the ability of IT administrators to support remote meeting rooms
• Thousand Eyes integration with Cisco 9800 series desktop phones and Webex calling to allow IT administrators to better identify the source of call quality issues.

Cisco also announced new integrations and capabilities for its AI Assistant for Webex, including:

• New third-party application integrations such as Glean, Salesforce, ServiceDesk, and Zendesk
• Support for Amazon Bedrock to allow customers to use a variety of large language models
• The ability to share AI generated content such as meeting summaries with third-party apps including Microsoft Outlook, Copilot, and Teams as well as Slack.

Furthermore, Cisco announced plans to deliver enhancements to its Vidcast app to allow for the automated creation of videos based on uploaded PPT and PDF files as well as the ability to use AI in Slido to automatically generate polls during webinars and events. Customer experience announcements include:

• Webex AI Agent to enable conversational customer self-service
• AI Agent Studio for quickly creating and deploying customized AI agents
• AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, providing automated call summaries, suggested responses, and the ability to add to an existing call summary when a call is resumed after a disconnect

In addition, Cisco also announced Agent Wellness, an AI tool for optimizing AI performance through call allocation, automated breaks, and automated agent scheduling. Availability of the above announcements varies, with most being delivered in the first half of 2025. Pricing was not disclosed for additional apps.