AI Integration in the Workplace with Amit Barave

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Textron tv.

I'm really happy to introduce Ahmed Barve, VP of Product Management WebEx, course WebEx by Cisco. For those of you who know, now, I, I kind of take it for granted. You know, WebEx is part of Cisco, but maybe you don't know that.

Ahmed, welcome to Tech on tv. It's great to have you on. Thank you for having me on, Alan.

Pleasure to be here. Absolutely. So, Ahmed, before we jump in to our topic of discussion today, which is AI chat, GPT, everyone's talking about that.

Let's talk a little bit about you, your VP of product management or WebEx by by Cisco. Um, give us a sense of your journey of, of how you came here to be here today. Uh, sure.

Um, Ivin with Cisco, uh, for a long time, Cisco's been phenomenal in terms of opportunities and, and, uh, ways to impact lives of users. Uh, my association with WebEx, uh, started, I shouldn't say association, but, but in my current role, uh, leading the product for WebEx started just two months prior to the, on onset of the pandemic. So it's been a phenomenal journey from there.

In some ways, it felt like one long day since then. But the amount of learning I've had since then, my team has had the work we've done on product. It's been immensely satisfying.

What a time to come into a video conferencing, uh, application, right? Just when the world needed it more than, I mean, it went from being sort of a nice to have to a mission critical. I can't exist without it type of application during Covid, right?

And We, and WebEx, as people would know from prior to the pandemic, would probably think about it as just as a video conferencing or a meeting stool. But since, since then, um, we've been very conscious about focusing the core problem, which is people collaborating, interacting with each other and making the most of it to move work forward. So since then, WebEx has actually evolved into a communication and collaboration platform.

And when we say that people think about it as, okay, you can do meetings, you can do TELENY and calling. You can do messaging other slack and what have you. Uh, but it's a lot more than that.

And actually two sort of defining moments have been this back and forth of everyone going remote and coming back and, and hybrid work. And then the next defining moment has been, I say the, the post chat GPT moment, like the December or November 30th was it, of 2022, when, when we all saw this in action. So, uh, leveraging those two and building the, the most compelling, if you will, or comprehensive hybrid work collaboration and communications platform powered by AI is, is what WebEx is focused on.

Absolutely. And you know, we, we've all, you know, since the, the pandemic, right? I, I think at first we were all very, very grateful to have video conferencing, right?

Like WebEx, no. There's, you know, the, the other tools out there, but I think you're right. Since that time, we, you know, in the, the typical sort of tech story is, okay, what have you, what have you done for me lately?

And video conferencing alone wasn't enough. I need collaboration tools. We need to share files, we need to deal with the whiteboard stuff.

We need asynchronous and synchronous kind of communication. And, and so we, we've seen the rise beyond just, you know, your video meetings and conferencing, and then you're right, uh, November will be two years kind of the world changed again on us a little bit, right? And kind of mind boggling where you look at the timeframe here, how crunched it is, but you know, this whole chat, GPT generative of AI promises to really have huge repercussions, right?

Huge changes on the horizon. And what I'd like to do on it with our time today is talk a little bit about how that's impacting WebEx specifically, right? Because everybody has to have sort of their GPT story now, right?

What are you, what are you doing with it? But also if you can, let's take it from WebEx out to the workplace in general, right? Because this is having, and, and that may tie into being more than a video conferencing, right?

That may tie into the whole WebEx as a workplace tool. So if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to run with it a bit. Um, sure.

I I think it's a, it's a topic dear to my heart. And if you don't mind, I'll start with what it means to the workplace before we go into, okay. Um, So the Socratic method, we're gonna go high here and then drill down, then Build out, uh, because, uh, no, no doubt.

Uh, chat, GPT uh, has been a seminal moment, but I'd say that the timeframe we talk about, uh, is because it became obvious to the everyday user. But the work that went in to make that possible has been going on for a few years before that. And it's, it's a culmination of those efforts.

And actually, uh, we've been at it in terms of doing a parallel or similar effort on the real time audio and video. And, and the thing I wanted to mention was, when you talk about collaboration or communications, workspace is about people working with each other and then people working with their customers or parties external to them, and then the IT or infrastructure people supporting and managing all of that and keeping it secure. That's essentially workplace collaboration and communication.

And AI has the potential to transform or uplevel each and every aspect of it. So, so we think about it as AI is affecting not just language, generative AI in terms of language, what you can do with text and docs is one thing. It can do a lot with how we, the quality of audio and video and share interactions that we have.

It can do a lot in terms of how you manage the network issues and security behind those communications. And then it can do a lot in terms of how do you conduct your interactions with your customers, think customer experience or, or customer support. So if you think of employee experience, how employees work with each other, IT and network experience in terms of how it's managed, kept secure and facilitated, facilitated and customer experience, how a company comes across to its partners and customers.

All of these three aspects are getting impacted by ai and lives are getting better because of that. That's, that's our view on, on AI's impact on, on communication and collaboration. I, I, I can't disagree with you at all.

I can't disagree with you at all, but, you know, so we, we, we very quickly saw that AI was sucking all the oxygen out of every conversation we were having, whether it was on DevOps or security or cloud or digital transformation, just everything. ai. And, and so we, we spun up tech strung ai.

It's the place where we try to keep our AI being, uh, coverage and content even still, it still bleeds through into everything, but what we're seeing is, and, and it's only natural. There was so much hype about what this is going to do and how it's gonna change to things and what's going to what, how your life is gonna be different. And now we're, I, I don't wanna say we're in the trou of disillusionment, you know, in the Gartner hype cycle thing, but we're starting to see, look, it may very well be all of these things and more someday today.

Here's what's real. Here's where rubber meets the road. So if you don't mind arm mean, let's talk a little bit about what we're seeing to, and we could get specific into WebEx, right?

What we're seeing specifically around, you know, AI chat, GPT, like, uh, functionality and how it's, how it's changing this application, this platform. I, I'd love to start with some concrete, uh, use cases that I'll start off with. Uh, I think the, the one use case that has been a more obvious to people is summarization and transcription.

Like, we have a conversation. Most common problem has been, has someone taken notes? Can someone send the notes?

Have those been captured well, and how do you find those, right? That has been a big productivity saver. Like, uh, in that is a feature capability that we've seen the strongest adoption on within three weeks of it becoming available.

People that are using, uh, their live summarization, taking action items, notes, and sharing those. We have gone further, uh, with WebEx. WebEx actually knows if a participant, for example, was late in joining by X number of minutes, as soon as the part participant joins the WebEx, uh, the AI assistant for WebEx immediately prompts the user.

Uh, notice that you've joined late, would you just like to get caught up and says yes, and you immediately get the summary of what happened in the 10 minutes before you Joined? That's amazing. Um, and, and it is, it is just done proactively and people find it phenomenally useful.

Um, I I could I you'd see that for sure. That's great. Um, And this is exactly what we hear from our users.

And the other one, people are seeing our, um, people often have to step away, right? Someone's at the door when you're joining from home and then you're trying to turn your video off mute and all of that. No, our video AI just detects if you stepped away, puts a be right back message on your uh behalf.

As soon as you're back, you explicitly can just tap a button, say, send me back into the meeting so people see that you're back and you get the cascading benefit because you are away for those five minutes. You also get catch me up for the time I missed. Yeah, true.

Yeah, that's great. It is just pretty amazing when you, when you think about it, Hey, can I put a wish in? So we do these interviews and then, but then we, you know, and they're 15 minutes, and then we wanna run 'em on social media or TikTok, well, TikTok, TikTok to social media too.

But we want like a, a a 32nd version highlights and a two minute version. I'm praying for the day that AI does this well for us, because I, I can't tell you how long it takes our editors right to, 'cause there's two parts of it. There's editing the video, but you can't edit the video until you know, what words, if you will, what parts of the video you want to keep.

You think AI could do that, Ellen? I'd say we're 50% of the ways there already, if not more. Uh, what we can do today, uh, is when you look at the recording of this interview, you actually have it chapterized based on high points or key moments, and you get these little video snippets or chapters, if you will.

And I think the next logical step is what you said that could we synthesize all of those in actually a little highlight reel or, or a summary and, and that's the next endeavor That would Well, when you do, make sure you reach out and let us know. Um, yeah, we, we have a big need for that over here. A big need.

Absolutely. We'd actually, let's, let me take you up on this and, and I'd love to have you as an, uh, early access user or customer, and We'll do that. We, we'll talk when we're done recording.

I'd love to do it. I I, we'll, we'll come back on it now. So that's one thing that's obviously we're getting there.

Uh, what other kinda, and look, I realize you don't have a crystal ball and we're not holding your feet to the fire, but give us, give us a peek into the near term future of other things that you think we might, you know, see come true here with, with this technology. I think the way, uh, our, our audio video interactions happen will get upleveled drastically. I'll, I'll give you an example.

The proverbial phone call background noise, right? We, we can do background noise cancellation in these tools, WebEx and, and what have you. But what, when someone is calling over their cell phone from an airport, Then they've done that too.

We now have the ability to actually remove the noise from someone who's coming from their mobile phone in the setting of an airport. And this is only possible through our audio, real time ai. So this is, you can say this is a realtime cousin of what these large language models do.

This is really small realtime media models because the processing has to be on small devices realtime. But we can already do that. You'll see, Wait a second.

You're saying this is being done on the phone, not in the cloud. Uh, correct. It is being done in both the, the cloud does help, but a lot of it needs to happen on the small form factor of a phone.

So, um, and this is why it's a continuo. You do a little bit on, you have to pick the best place where the processing power is available and do a combination of cloud and the edge and deliver the experience. And mind you, all of this has a big, big implication on how the data is treated in terms of privacy, security, and, and the data governance posture.

And that has been our non-negotiable. So anything we are doing in terms of our data models, real time language or what have you, it first has to pass through our responsible AI and transparency on models, checklists. And, and that is going to be one of the defining, um, criteria on how, how fast the AI adoption happens, particularly in the enterprise and the business segment.

People will become increasingly more aware and they'll look for this level of transparency and, and responsibility criteria met. I love it. That's fantastic.

You know what, we're, we're just about outta time, but I mean, for people out here who want to find out more, stay on top of what's going on. Where, where can, I mean, Cisco and WebEx itself is a big infrastructure in terms of the website. Where can they go and maybe sign up for information or stay in the know?

ai, but just search for WebEx AI in your favorite search bar or a favorite AI chatbot, and you get all the right ones. Wanna make sure I get this right. ai will actually bring them there.

The, the site. Fantastic. I mean, what, it's, you know what?

I'm not even in it. You are, but it's exciting. It's an exciting time to be alive and working in this, in this industry, isn't it?

I, I couldn't agree more. It's one of those moments where you, every day you wake up seeing both sides how scary this could be if not done right. And how impactful and game changing this could be when you get it right.

And that, that's the beauty of being in the middle of this. I'm a, I'm a glass half full kind of guy, right? I just think, yeah, that's gonna be, there's some scary stuff and bad people will do bad things, but the promise of this technology and how it is going to change everything, just, it keeps me excited every day, man.

Anyway, thank you for joining us here on Techstrong tv. Keep up the great work, come back and keep us posted about what's going on. I would love to, and thank you for having me once again, Alan.

It was a pleasure. My Pleasure. Ahed Avi, VP product Management WebEx by Cisco here on Techstrong tv.

We'll take a break. We'll be right back.