Cisco Brings AI Agents Into the Flow of Collaboration

Hey everyone. We're back here at the Fairmont Austin, continuing our coverage of Webex One 2026 in Austin. Well, as I mentioned, in Austin, Texas.

Our next guest is Anurag Dhingra. Did I say that right? Yes.

Very good. Okay. If you practice enough, it starts working.

You probably don't know this, but if you covered, or if you had a look at our coverage for Cisco Live, I actually had a chance to speak with Anurag there. But if you didn't, it's okay. We're going to recap some of it.

You could always go back and watch that, by the way, on Techstrong TV or the Techstrong TV YouTube channel, but is a different conversation anyway. Anurag, welcome back to Techstrong TV. It's great to have you.

Thank you, Alan. So I gave your name. Yeah.

But I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Tell people your title, kind of your journey to get here. Yeah.

So, my current role is the SVP and General Manager for Networking and Collaboration at Cisco. I mean, this is Webex One, so this is very much focused on the collaboration technology. A part of my charter also includes our networking business, so that is all of the wired and wireless networks that go into any workplace, any industrial environment, but also the data center networking end.

So that's the remit, and we're doing some very interesting things by bringing the technologies together into a platform at Cisco. So I'm very excited about this. Absolutely.

Got a confession. Yeah. Originally when, I think, Webex One, and I've known Webex, I think, since Cisco acquired Webex.

Yeah. That's got to be what, 20 years, 18 years, something like that. Something like that, yeah.

Yeah. I think collaboration, I think video conferencing, I think- Right ... communication like that.

I went on a tour yesterday of the Cisco office here in Austin, and it really kind of changed my bedrock- Yeah ... if you will, my foundation of what true collaboration means. In my previous conversation with Bernardo, I was telling him one of the companies I founded back in the early 2000s, we were in the Mobius Venture Capital incubator.

Back then, incubators were quite the thing. We had a lot of it right. We had that same sort of space, with the phone booths, the small conference rooms, the bigger areas for group work and everything.

We had Cisco gear even, but not this Cisco gear. Not this. Yeah, of course.

I'm going to ask you if you could describe to our audience, for you, what's the real spice, what's the real special secret here, the special sauce? Right. So like you said, we've been in this business for a long time.

Cisco has been in this business for a long time, and one of the things that when I look back at the industry has been very much how do we make the collaboration experience better, not just for people who are meeting live in person, but especially when you have some people who are not in the room who are remote, how do we deliver an experience so they even feel included, they feel like they're in the room? And when video came on the scene many, many years ago, that was such a phenomenal unlock for that experience. And our focus has always been how do we deliver high definition, lifelike video.

So it almost feels like you can reach out into the screen and shake somebody's hand. Like that's the experience that we've been building. But now here we are in the age of AI, and so the question we are asking ourselves right now is, as agents start to take on more and more work, as we start to use AI to do some of the work, when people actually get together, those moments matter even more.

Yes. And how does technology make those moments even better? Help you get to decisions faster, help you apply your judgment and do brainstorming, help you build relationships better, and what can we do from a technology point of view?

And so that's where the audio and video technology continues to evolve to support those in-person and remote collective- Absolutely ... aspects. And a revelation I had yesterday, the remote video, video conferences I called it- Yeah ...

is really becoming just a smaller and smaller part of the collaboration experience. Absolutely. Yeah.

It's about sharing data. Yeah. It's about intelligently reading the room, literally reading the room.

Right. Where someone's sitting. Where is someone outside of the zone walking by?

If we're having a conversation, how do I pipe it to the person at the other end of the table, let alone the other end of the country, so that we're all in here? This, I don't want to use the word smart networking because I think someone had that word term already, but it's smart. Yeah.

It's intelligent. Yeah. " Well, so the reality is meetings are only one way for people to work together with each other.

Yeah. There are different modalities to collaborate. You can pick up the phone and just call someone if you're trying to do a one-on-one.

Of course, in person, we can talk to each other. More and more people use messaging and asynchronous ways of connecting with each other, and collaborate around documents. So there are so many different ways to collaborate with each other.

Our mission is when you are doing a real-time interaction, how do we make that the best audio and video experience possible? And then when you're doing an asynchronous communication, how do we make sure that that context, how do we connect the dots across all of the interactions that you're having so that context is always available to you to move work forward? And now in the age of AI, all of the agents that you're going to start to use, they will need the same context as well, and that's the system that we're building as we think about the future for going forward.

If someone said, "Summarize the big news," what's the big takeaway from this year's Webex One? Yeah. I know Jeetu spoke today and others.

Give us your take. All right. So look, like I said earlier, the question we were asking ourselves is as people start to adopt agentic AI more to get their work done, what are the implications of that?

What are the implications of that for how we work? What are the implications for how we design our workplaces and how we actually engage with our customers? And so when you think about those three problem statements, how can we build technology to address all of that?

So the announcements that we made here at Webex One fit into one of those, all of the announcements fit into one of those buckets. And so for example, we are giving the Webex app a brand new experience so that you can obviously still do meetings and messaging and calling, but now you can more naturally interact with agents and start to delegate tasks to agent. Webex helps you plan for your day, for your work week.

Webex helps you like a digital chief of staff to basically not only help you prepare, but follow through on the commitments that you're making. So that's one of the marquee announcements. We are introducing new technology to deliver intelligent workplace experiences.

And there the goal is really a dual goal. One, how do we deliver the most amazing experience in the workplace? Whether that is with flawless network connectivity and Wi-Fi that always works, right?

Right. Or the best collaboration experience when you go to a meeting room. But at the same time, how do we give insights to the people who are running these environments, whether they're IT managers or facilities managers, so they can best optimize the spaces, they can best utilize the infrastructure that they have, and on an ongoing basis make it easier for them to operate.

And then finally, for customer experience, we have a whole category for office or contact centers and there it's like how can we apply agentic AI to help brands build better relationships with their customers? And can you actually use this technology so that every customer feels like they're your only customer? You're giving them such great service that they feel like they have a direct relationship with you, and they keep coming back to you again and again.

So that's the, at a high level, the announcements that we're making. There's a lot more detail to go through this, but this is kind of the theme of the event here. No, I asked the question at the facility last night.

It's more than just you're using agentics or agents to help you manage this experience. Right. What do you do when my coworker is an agent?

Yeah. Right? So now it's a different experience because they speak a different language.

Yeah. They're at a different scale. Yeah.

Right? It's a different thing. So Alan, when you think about it, go back in time maybe four years ago.

ChatGPT came out on the scene That was a seminal moment. That sort of opened people's eyes to AI is actually getting useful now, right? We've been talking about AI for a long time, even before that, but that experience showed people that the technology is starting to become useful.

I think you're seeing a second moment like that right now with the emergence of personal agents. Yeah. Just in the last few weeks, let's say four or five weeks, there are new personal agents that have come on the scene.

Meta has Muse, OpenAI introduced Darts, there's Instinct, the Grok bot. And these agents are showing people that you can not just ask AI for questions, you can actually ask it to do things for you. And they are capable of doing long-running tasks.

You can give them an assignment, you can go away, they'll keep working for a couple of hours. People are finding creative uses to save money, to book tickets, and all sorts of things. And so our job is to figure out what is the implication for that, for how we work.

And how do we build collaboration technology to accommodate this way of working, and how do we make it so natural that this just feels like second nature to people, right? And so that's what we're solving for, and that's really what we're unveiling here at this conference. So I couldn't think of a better company to ask this question.

When we talk about that future, and that future is near term, not long term. Yeah. That future is here.

Right now. Yeah. Of course, the biggest issue people worry about, security.

Yes. And because you wear that second hat of networking- Right, yes ... the network is the logical point.

Yeah. I don't want to use the word choke point because you can't choke an agent. But the network's the logical guardrail- Right ...

where I could keep this thing. Challenges around that? Yeah.

So Anirudh, you're absolutely right. Network is actually a very strategic control point, both for visibility and for enforcement of security policy. And so the network has a role to play.

But the problem needs to be solved with a much more holistic viewpoint around how do you observe the behavior of agents, how do you put guardrails around it, and when you feel, or when you detect that something is going off track, how do you actually contain that? And of course, the network can be a strategic control point for cutting off- Enforcement ... as an enforcement point.

But what we're doing as a company is we're actually leaning in quite heavily because we think that observability and security- Which is Splunk and all of that Splunk and our security- Security ... have to come together to solve this problem. And that's what we're building.

That's not something that I directly manage, but one of our peers has that part of the business. But the beauty of what we're doing at Cisco is we built a platform, and that platform has those capabilities built in. So when we talk about bringing agentic capabilities into WebEx, they automatically get secured by that platform capability.

And look, it's almost a game of cat and mouse right now. As the state of the art progresses- Always is ... security has always been like that.

We have to make sure that our efforts to make the technology safe and secure are actually running even faster, and that's where we focus on at Cisco. So I was at Splunk conf over in Denver last month. Yeah.

And I spoke to, who's the gentleman who just came from Google? He's running- Sunil. Sunil.

Yes. What a great guy he is. Yeah.

Very passionate. Yeah. And we had this similar conversation.

Right. Because I think we'd like to think we live in a world where everything is interoperable, and it all works together magically. Doesn't always work like that.

Cisco is one of the few companies, though, that can marry that observability and security- Right ... to the network. Yeah.

Through the network. Yeah. To the collaboration point.

Right. Right? It's almost like a vertical integration.

Yeah. Look, first of all, I think security is a team sport, right? I think the fact that the technology has advanced so much that previously what would require intense investment in compute infrastructure, maybe some type of attacks would only be done by nation states.

That's not possible that one person using a very capable model can actually launch those type of attacks. And so to defend against that, we have to come together. The good guys have to actually work with each other.

And so the ecosystem is part of the solution here when it comes to security. Now, as a networking company, we were started on the whole principle of interoperability. The origin story for Cisco is that there were different type of networks that couldn't talk to each other.

And so our founders built a product that could stitch those networks together in order to ask them, right? That's the origin story. So interoperability is in our DNA, and this is why you hear from us again and again that we believe in open ecosystems.

At all of our conferences, we announce integrations and ecosystem partners, and I think that's the way to actually operate right now. Our customers expect us to work with others in the industry. And at the end of the day, what we do is in support of what our customers are trying to do.

So I'm a firm believer in it, I think the company is a firm believer in it, and especially for security, there's just no other way to operate. Agreed. Agreed.

We've been all around the world, it seems like. Let's bring it back to collaboration to close it down. Went over the announcements, went over the- Yeah ...

the facility. At the end of the day, we live in a world, I think you touched on it, not everyone's in the office. And even I'm not always in the office.

I'm here Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and- Yeah, you can work anywhere. Yeah ... that's where the world is.

We work from anywhere. Cisco's bringing the network, the collaboration- Yeah ... everywhere.

Yes. Anywhere. Yes.

But my personal opinion, and I- Sure ... shared my book with you, is the world's going to change again. Yeah.

It always does. Right. This is about the fifth change I've seen in my life already.

What do you envision is that next big change here? Yeah. Look, when I take a step back and ask myself, how does the world actually move forward, I think it's people coming together, aligning around shared goals, and really pushing the envelope to make the world a better place.

That's how innovation happens, people building on each other's ideas and collaborating, and that's the sweet spot for us. How do we empower that? How do we empower that process?

How do we bring people together in a more effective way so they can build relationships and can be more successful? And that's really what we do. Whether that is networking to connect everything- Right ...

including agents now, or providing the collaboration technology where people can collaborate around work and build relationships with each other, or how they engage with their end customers. That is really what we focus on building. And look, the technology will continue to advance, but ultimately the bigger goal for us is really make it easier for our customers to build relationships with each other, do more innovation, move the world forward, and do it safely and securely.

I love it. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Alan.

I hope it won't wait till Cisco Live next year to see you again. You know we do this remote, anytime you'd like to chat or something, just say. I'm so glad to have more opportunities.

All righty. Thank you. We're going to continue our coverage here of Webex One from Austin.

But you're watching Texron TV.