Cisco Puts Trust and Context at the Heart of AI Collaboration
Bringing People, Agents, and Control Together
AI collaboration needs more than capable agents. It also needs trust, visibility, and clear boundaries for how those agents operate. That is the central theme of this WebexOne 2026 wrap-up with Snorre Kjesbu and Alan Shimel in Austin.
Kjesbu, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Collaboration, connects the event’s workplace, networking, and customer-experience discussions. He describes agents as an emerging workforce and control as a critical enterprise requirement. The opportunity is to support intelligent, adaptable systems without leaving their behavior unmanaged.
His analogy is a talented teenager: quick to learn, full of potential, and still in need of guardrails. Cisco’s role, he explains, is to help organizations bring those capabilities into a trusted enterprise environment.
Designing Workplaces for Users and Operators
The conversation also challenges the idea that office work and remote work are competing choices. Kjesbu argues that organizations must support both. There will always be someone joining remotely, even when an office becomes a compelling place to gather.
In-person interactions can strengthen culture, shared purpose, and informal support. Technology should help remote participants contribute while making the physical workplace more useful for everyone.
Kjesbu describes using data from wireless access points, networking equipment, collaboration devices, microphones, and room panels. Those insights can reveal coverage gaps or show whether meeting spaces are overused or underused. They can also inform decisions about room layouts and capacity.
For service owners, Cisco Cloud Control brings together information across networking, security, and collaboration. The aim is better operational visibility and more informed planning. AI collaboration must work for the people using the services and the teams responsible for running them.
From Contact Centers to Context Centers
Kjesbu closes with a vision for customer service built around relationships rather than isolated calls. He describes a shift from the contact center to the context center.
That model would connect a customer’s history and preferences across calls, messages, email, and other interactions. An airline, for example, could understand previous trips and service problems rather than treating each request as a fresh start.
The potential is more personalized assistance with continuity across channels. For enterprise leaders, the discussion ties that ambition to trusted agents, connected data, and practical operational control.
Transcript
Hey, everyone. We're continuing our coverage here of Webex One in Austin, Texas this year for '26. And our next guest, if you're watching these in chronological order, and I hope you are, this is our last interview, and so this is the wrap-up.
This is where we're going to bring it all together. I want to introduce you to Snorre Kjesbu, and Snorre is probably the best person I could think of to bring this all together. If you watched our coverage at Cisco Live a few months back, I had the pleasure of meeting Snorre.
It was right around the World Cup. You guys had just lost that heartbreaker. Oh, we had.
Yeah. Yeah. Snorre, as I told you off camera, I've had the pleasure of meeting so many of the different division heads, if you will.
We spoke about networking. We spoke about collaboration. We spoke about real estate and offices.
We spoke about Webex. We spoke about the product and the marketing of it. Of course, how agentics and AI have entered the picture.
But those are all silos. Let's bring it together. For customers out there, what's the vision Cisco is bringing to them here at Webex One?
How does this all fit? How does it make their life better? Yeah.
So there are actually a number of things, but if I lifted even one more level, I think there are a couple of key trends that we see out there. One is that we see that inference is a new workload, and we see that by agents using more and more and more compute power. The other one is that agents are the new workforce, and we see that agents are entering the workforce and what they can do for us.
And let's hold that thought for a second because that's super important to what we're doing on collaboration, too. And then you can talk about token as a new economy. But the final one that I think is key, and that we talk a lot about as well, is the control is the new mult.
Mm-hmm. And combining agents being the new workforce and control being the new mult, that is really where Cisco is having a sweet spot because with that, it's about trust, it's about control, it's about observability, crossed with an enterprise and professional-ready way of using agents as part of the workforce in addition to people. And I think that if you take that really, really high level area, I would say that agents are the new workforce and the way we work on control and manageability is the key.
I like that a lot. I think one of the things, one of the truths that showed itself over and over these last few days is, look, we are certainly in a post-COVID world. We're in a AI and agentic is my neighbor world, my coworker.
And things are never going back to what they were before. We're never going to have everyone, no matter how great we make our offices, no matter how intelligent they are, not everyone's going to be in the office every day. We're going to work from wherever.
Mm. Whether it's an airport, a house, a hotel, wherever we are. Mm.
I think one of the interesting things I saw was you can't convince me that your experience working in your hotel room is as good as working in an office like Cisco has here in Austin, right? As a CEO of a company, nothing beats having people in the office collaborating together. Mm.
But I think part of your mission, part of your charter is to make it as close to that as possible. Mm. But I think what's key here, though, is actually to combine the two.
Mm-hmm. I think both of your statements are correct. So one thing is there will always be someone remote.
Yeah. Okay? Secondly, coming to the office is a really good idea.
Yeah. Okay. If everyone's always there's someone remote, it means that any venue, any place you are, you must be able to accommodate the people that are remote.
Secondly, creating the office as a magnet so you can get people back into the office, it's really about how you create that venue. The technology you have available, the way you build it, the way you design it, the way you operate it. That's absolutely key.
We can talk about the latter in a second, but what's really top of my mind, do you know why I'm such a big fan of the office? No. It really goes from a focus on me to a focus on us.
Us. Agreed. Yeah.
Because there are a few things that it's just magic when people get together. Yeah. You build culture.
Yeah. You build purpose. Mm-hmm.
You can actually take care of each other. " That is not something you schedule on Fridays at 11:30. That is something you see when you walk past somebody's desk, or you meet them when they're getting a cup of coffee.
And I think that one of the key things to create really a good culture and a good company and drive innovation are think about us more than we think about me. And I think that that is really one of the essential things why both are so key. So yes, you will work from home, you will work remotely, and we must accommodate that, and you need office space that is truly great.
Agreed. I share that sentiment. And again, I'm just bringing it, as human nature does, I'm bringing it to my own situation at Textron.
We have a core group of people who live locally and come to our office. The other half don't. They don't live locally.
They can't come. And again, as the CEO, I see the difference in collaboration between people who work together in the office and don't. Technology, though, intelligence, whether we're talking about AI or just human intelligence, plays a huge role in trying to level this out, though, in trying to make-- Look, one is not a substitute for the other, but as you say, we got to do both.
How do I make the best of it? And what I saw here this week, I think really shows that you guys have thought a lot about this and come up with some interesting solutions. If you wouldn't mind, share with the audience some of these ways.
Yeah. So we really always have two focus areas when we design our products and our features and our applications. We always want to make sure that we create products and features that are great for the end user.
That's people like you and me in the office, having a meeting, going about our daily business. The second focus we have is always to create products and features that are great for the ones that own and operate the service. Yeah.
Because in all organizations in 2026, this is mission critical. Yeah. Full stop.
So if we start with the first one, which is really about having a great user experience, one of the new concepts that we are working hard on is what we call intelligent workplace experiences. What we're trying to do with that is to make sure that using data from your wireless access points, from your networking gear, from your collaboration devices, from the microphones in the room, from the touch panels on the outside of the room, it goes on and on and on and on. You can actually use that hardcore data, make an analysis of your workplace, and improve it.
That might mean that you get better coverage through more access points. It might mean that you see that your meeting rooms are oversubscribed or undersubscribed. Maybe you can have fewer of them, or you can build a partition and take one and make two of them.
That is really about user experience in all of it. Then it comes to the people that own and operate the service. We can, through what we call Cisco Cloud Control, give them superpowers because we have access to data, or they have access to data from networking, from security, from collaboration, and they can use that both to make sure you operate But also to make sure that you can make qualified decisions about how you're going to drive that forward.
So I think that the key that we're trying to make sure we do is a combination of great experience for the people that are using the services, and the ones that own and operate. I want to bring us back to the beginning of this conversation. Soccer.
Well, after soccer, excuse me, of the Cisco part of the conversation. But you mentioned that control is the new moat. Mm-hmm.
And I know some people at home, they hear that, and they're saying, "Of course, this is Cisco's evil plot to control, right? " No, the control are the people who need to run the network, the people who need to run that collaboration. They need the control in order to create.
They're the ones that the moat is empowering. It is. But let me make a slightly fun analogy.
Okay. Okay. I got one for you, but go ahead.
Yeah. If you think of AI as a teenager. Mm-hmm.
Teenagers are highly intelligent, they're highly adaptive, they have an incredible ability to learn, they're a sponge for information, and they lack a little bit of guardrails. Yes. But you really want someone like that in the workplace, honestly.
Yeah. Okay. Because you want intelligence, you want the adaptability, you want the sponge, you just need some guardrails there.
That control is the new moat. That is a great way of putting it. And that is not an evil plot.
That is actually seeing massive opportunity in something that has superpowers, but you need to structure it a little. And that's what Cisco's role is here. That is what we're doing.
And the other thing is that we are driving and we're coming at this from enterprise and enterprise ready. That's who we are. That's what we drive.
That's what we can do. I mean, we're the mother of all bandwidth. Right.
And that is mission critical everywhere. So what we're capable of doing is actually to use that and use that technology as well now in the shift that's happening into the AI world. I love it.
Final thoughts to leave with the audience? Yeah, I have a final thought, and that is that one of the areas that's going to undergo a massive disruption is the contact center business. Yeah.
Up till now, our contact center business has been how good are you at making a queue of people dialing in, and how you answer that and how you route those calls. It's going to be dramatically changed, and AI will change that dramatically. You will literally go from a contact center to what we call a context center.
Context about my relationship with a brand. It could be an airline, it could be another brand. It's not about that one call only.
They know, what did I fly last month? Did I lose my luggage 10 months ago? They can have all of that information, almost like you have your own relationship manager.
And that relationship is not through one mode of communication. It is multimodal. It is through text, through email, through phone calls, through contact center, through everything.
And when you bring all of that information together and you bring that in, you get a very different way of operating between a brand and a customer. And what will happen is that everyone will have their own personal relationship manager with their favorite brands out there. That is a major difference, and I think that's going to be wonderful because you will get help 100% of the time with all of the right knowledge about your preferences and what has happened to you and everything.
And contact center is probably one of the spaces that will be impacted and changed the most by AI going forward. I love it. Thank you so much.
Thank you. A pleasure. It was a great Webex One here.
Looking forward to the next one. But not just waiting till next year. I think these changes are coming so quickly now.
They are. The iteration, reiterate. It's a great time to be alive in the business.
It is great fun and it is so much to learn, and it gives me a real kick. Me too. That's going to wrap us.
We've had a great run here at Cisco Webex One, but we're going to call it a day on our coverage. I hope you've enjoyed. tv.
They will be under Webex One, so you'll be able to see them there, or our YouTube channel or our OTT app if you like Roku, Apple TV, Amazon, I don't know, Android. If you've got a screen, you can watch these, and we hope you will. Until then, this is Alan Shimel for Techstrong TV.
Thanks, everyone.
