Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Cisco Webex’s Cognitive Collaboration uses AI to take meetings and discussions to a whole new level. 

Bringing Context and Intelligence to Meetings

The Webex design team is always thinking of how they can make meetings better. In video and screen sharing, great sound is needed. But technology can do so much more. It can be like that great assistant who not only takes care of the technical stuff but also slips useful notes in the middle of the conversation during a meeting.

This context and intelligence helps build stronger relationships, have better conversations with customers and make smarter, faster decisions.

For Cisco, this isn’t about bolting on a few gimmicky AI-powered features. It’s a mindset.  Webex can remove tedious tasks, help users get and stay engaged and make life at work easier. Just imagine how these new features could improve the work day.

• People Insights gives you professional profiles about the people you’re meeting—in real time. Keep in mind we use context and intelligence to serve these up—so even if you’re meeting someone with a common name like John Smith we will give you the right John Smith. And these aren’t static, one-dimensional profiles. We scour the Web for publicly available information to create a living, breathing profile of the people and companies you care about, and we keep these up to date with the latest news. This is available as a trial now, with general availability slated for June.

• Webex Assistant is what is behind two of the new features in the example above. The assistant’s new Proactive Join lets you walk into the room and be asked if you want to join your meeting. To accomplish this, we first needed to know who you are (which we do thanks to an innovation called intelligent proximity). Then we needed to be able to peek into the calendar to see what’s next. And Webex Assistant’s new First Match let Webex know you probably were trying to call Susan Lee. It feels a lot like magic—it looks at the people in your own organization (via the company directory) and scans your Webex Teams spaces to see who you talk to most to make its best guess. In early field trials, Webex gave customers its top three guesses. But its top pick proved right so often that customers asked us to just serve up the first match. You can even use it to add someone to a call already underway.Webex Assistant, along with First Match technology, is generally available now across the entire Webex Room Series. Proactive Join is available on a limited basis now and will be generally available in June.

• Facial recognition is what is attaches those name/title labels to the three people you never met before in our example. We’ve said before that video is “better than being there,” and that certainly holds true here.  Remote people need not guess who’s who in that big conference room filled with new faces. This will be available in June.

“Cognitive Collaboration is a game changer for Cisco customers across all industries,” said Amy Chang, SVP and GM, Collaboration Technology Group, Cisco. “When we enable people to collaborate from wherever they are in a way that’s intuitive, easy and smart, we make their work and life experiences better and more productive.”

(0)(0)