Cisco Launches AI Innovations to Enhance Employee Experience

WebexOne, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) unveiled new AI-fueled solutions to enhance employee connection and collaboration. The company announced several new innovations, including Cisco Spatial Meetings, Ceiling Microphone Pro, new Cisco AI Assistant for Webex capabilities and more.

Today, employees and IT teams want solutions that enable seamless and intelligent collaboration. From delivering enhanced meeting quality to enabling increased productivity and streamlined device management, Cisco’s new AI innovations are designed to transform work and workspaces.

“With AI baked into every part of Cisco’s product portfolio, we're helping organizations futureproof their workspaces with solutions ready for the next generation of how and where people work,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. “We’re providing our customers with intelligent, adaptable, and easy-to-manage technology that enhances experiences for their employees and customers.”

Delivering Distance Zero Experiences

In this era of distributed work, employees need experiences that make all meeting attendees feel like they’re in the same room, even if they aren’t – a concept Cisco calls Distance Zero. Cisco is leveraging AI to reimagine smart workplaces and enable equitable and inclusive meeting experiences for everyone regardless of where and how they work. New innovations include:

• Cisco Spatial Meetings: Turn any space equipped with a Cisco Room Bar Pro into a stunning immersive studio and deliver spatial video to Webex for Apple Vision Pro users – easily with a simple software upgrade. With any Room Bar Pro device and an Apple Vision Pro, users can do things like product demos, remote training, education and more with video that includes remarkable depth and dimension.
  
  
• Cisco Ceiling Microphone Pro: Capture natural conversation from anywhere in a variety of workspaces. This industry-first adaptive microphone uses AI to automatically adjusts to speaker position and changes to room configuration. Compatible with Cisco cameras and room systems, the Cisco Ceiling Microphone Pro delivers a fully integrated and immersive meeting experience that is easy to manage. Microphone set up is now faster than ever, taking minutes, instead of hours.
  
  

Managing Smart Workspaces

With the rise of flexible work, IT responsibilities have expanded alongside increased employee expectations. To address this, Cisco is empowering IT and facilities teams to streamline their work with:

• Workspace Designer: Fully automates the design and customization of workspaces. It provides a 3D view of audio and video coverage, and accelerates the time it takes to deploy video-enabled hybrid workspaces. 
  
  
• Smart Diagnostics in Control Hub: Enables IT to dynamically identify and resolve meeting room issues in real time.
  
  
• ThousandEyes integration for the Desk Phone 9800 Series and Webex Calling: Helps monitor and troubleshoot in real-time, reducing downtime by tracking where call issues originate.
  
  

Advancing Employee Productivity and Engagement

To advance collaboration and increase productivity, the Cisco AI Assistant will enable users to:

• Automate workflows through integrations with enterprise apps including Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and more.
• Integrate with Glean, enabling mutual customers to enhance discussions and speed up decision-making with its knowledge graph and connectors including Outlook, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
• Choose the Large Language Model (LLM) that best fits their needs with Amazon Bedrock.
• Share summaries and recaps across third-party platforms including Microsoft Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Slack.

Additional new capabilities to enhance employee engagement include:

• Vidcast enhancements: New features like highlights, chapters and transcripts enhance asynchronous video capabilities. AI-generated Vidcast will soon allow users to upload a PDF or PPT and automatically generate a script and voice-overs in the language and tone of their choice. This is a major time-saver and will enhance the user experience.
• AI-generated Slido polls: Meeting participants can use AI to generate Slido polls during webinars and large meetings.