Webex Brings People and AI Agents Into Shared Workspaces

Hey everyone. We're back here at the Fairmont Hotel in Austin, Texas, for our Webex One coverage. My next guest is Craig Burnham.

Craig, first of all, welcome to Techstrong TV. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

It's great to be here. My pleasure. So Craig, well, let's start off with, what do you do at Cisco and how'd you get here?

Sure. I've been at Cisco for about 10 years. I am the vice president of product marketing and solutions marketing, which is really for us, a lot of that's around helping bring our new products to market, right?

And so that is what we focus on, and honestly, that is what we're really here to do at Webex One. So my team and is focused on kind of bringing these new launches to market at Webex One, talking about them with our customers, and getting feedback while we're here to kind of find out if it's landing. Now, is that just for collaboration and Webex, not- It's actually, so it does cross everything that we put really in the Future-Proof Workplace bucket.

Okay. So everything in that pillar of Future-Proof Workplace, which is campus and branch networking, collaboration- Sure ... everything in there, that is- It's part of that ...

we cover and we cross all those. Yeah. Excellent.

And you've been at Cisco for about 10 years now. About 10 years, yeah. It'll be 10 years in January, so.

Always in this division? I've been in the same space more or less. And honestly, I've been in the same area, and a lot has changed around me.

So things are- Really has ... slightly different than they were 10 years ago, and- And a lot different than they were 20... I was telling one of our earlier guests, I went on the tour of the facility yesterday.

Yeah. And back in like the early 2000s, I had started a company, co-founded a company, and we were working out of the Mobius Venture Capital incubator. Back then it was incubators, not accelerators, in Boulder.

Mm-hmm. It was a Colorado version of that office, right? Yep.

More wood, brown flagstone, but- Yep ... same kind of look and feel workspaces and phone booths and that. Yeah.

And we had Cisco gear, but not this Cisco gear. No. Right?

It's changed a lot, I know, and that's how- It's really big ... and that's why I'm still here, honestly, is because Cisco's changed so much, and it's been so fun to kind of watch it happen. I mean, when I started, it was all about the cloud.

Yeah. And everything was just cloud transition and where people are at. And then, we had the pandemic in the middle of that- Yeah ...

where especially collaboration was front and center. And so, we really, the entire industry changed basically overnight to meet the needs of the entire world all at the same time, and Webex was a huge part of that. And then, we had return to office after that, and that's kind of calmed down.

And now we have this kind of new AI era that we've been going through for the last couple of years, ever since ChatGPT came out. Yeah. And that's been crazy.

Well, you know what I find interesting, so I just wrote a book that came out yesterday. Congrats. Thank you.

And number one bestseller on Amazon. Day one, baby. Yep.

Selling. But it's called "The Indispensability Trap," but one of the things I write about there, almost counterintuitively, the more popular, the more indispensable AI gets- Yeah ... the more, like Jevons paradox, if you're familiar.

The more it gets commoditized, the more in demand it is, the more it gets used. Yep. But The Indispensability Trap aspect of it is the more it gets used, the more people are going to expect it to be cheaper- Yep ...

better, faster. And in the case of AI, that may very well be- Yep ... not in the cloud.

It may be in the facility- Yeah ... where we've got AI running locally. I don't worry about the tokens.

I don't worry about the whole cloud infrastructure thing. I'm almost going back to running my own LAN. I know.

Well, it's interesting. When you were talking about that- Oh, man ... it's making me think too, I think we kind of still don't know, and I've heard that in these scenarios, we kind of overestimate the short-term impact of things- Yeah ...

but underestimate- For sure ... usually the long-term impact. And so we kind of think, and I think there's always a little bit of this disillusionment that happens.

" And I think it's doing some amazing things, but it's probably kind of falling a little short in some areas. But I feel like, in the long term, we don't even comprehend how much of an impact it's going to have, right? Especially as you talk about kind of that paradox and as it gets commoditized and where we get in five, 10 years from now, I just think we probably won't even be able to imagine- No ...

what that's like. We're guessing wrong in some way or another. I think we can't imagine what new jobs this is going to create.

We can't say for sure what jobs it's going to absolutely eliminate. Mm-hmm. Yep.

We can't decide, is it going to run here on our phone- Yep ... or in the closet, in the server closet at my office, or on the cloud, or maybe all three. Yeah.

And I have an intelligent agent harness that decides where I'm going to use that- Yeah ... based on what it is. I mean, these are all...

So for a company that prides itself on intelligent collaboration- Yeah ... that's a hard, how do you get your head around that? It is.

Well, I mean, that's interesting too, and honestly, listen, Cisco is shaping, we have a part in shaping how this comes out, right? We're not just passive here. We're not just spectators.

We are actually having these discussions of, "Hey, how should this look," right? And we are actually kind of on the forefront of trying to figure out in the workplace at least, right? For my area that I'm focused on, that is absolutely what we're thinking about is how do we want it to go?

And we're talking to customers, and that's what Webex One is really all about is saying- Sure ... "Hey, what challenges are you having? What is it that we can do?

" And that's why we're building tools that actually are going to shape how we interact, and that's some of the things that we announced here at Webex One, too, is- I want to jump into some of those announcements, but I want to make one other point with you. I wasn't always on this side of the camera. I was a startup vendor for 20 plus years, venture-backed companies.

And one of the things I learned about putting on events like this, as much as we're here selling to our customers, telling them what's new, it's a two-way street. For sure. Right?

And we're learning, what are they doing? What do they want? Where is it coming up short?

Where's, what their needs are. Yep. And especially for a guy like you, product marketing like that, right?

It's so important- Yeah ... that you can get that intelligence, right? " Oh, for sure.

For sure. And I think we're actually pretty good at that, right? I think that's one thing that's great about Cisco is, I mean, we're very customer centric from that standpoint, and my team specifically, just for what I cover, we've got customer advocacy as a part of solutions.

And our job is to actually bring the customers here and bring the topics and ask them what they want to talk about, and we have over 50 customer speakers here with us. Mm-hmm. And so what's cool about what I get to do is I actually get there, and we sit there, and we bring them on panels, and they're in there talking with us and giving us feedback on our products a lot of times before they even come to market.

It's like the underground channel that people don't realize is one of the, you should pay just to do that. 100%. Right?

Yeah. And it's a great thing. Yeah.

But that being said, of course, releasing news, releasing new products, telling people the vision as far to what it's at. We had that today- Yeah ... with G2's keynote and all that follows, and we'll have some more tomorrow.

Of course, this is not live. By the time people see it- Yep ... it'll have already happened.

But Craig, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to carry this. Yeah. Tell us, where do you think, what were the stories here this week?

What should our people at home- Yeah ... be focused on? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, and you can kind of chime in as we go or ask questions as we go. I hope so. But yeah.

So, if you got to watch the keynote, you'll know this, but if you didn't, G2, Anurag, Sonoi, we're all kind of discussing today. But the big theme of the day was, because of all the changes happening around us, we know that collaboration has to change with it. Like everything that we think about collaboration Has got to change and it will change, kind of like what we just talked about.

And 10 years from now, it's going to be completely different with starting today, really. Yep. And we know that how we work, where we work, and how we engage with customers, that's how we think about it, right?

In those chunks. Those things all need to change, and that's really what we were focused on for our customers. Absolutely.

So let's dig into each of those, if you don't mind. Let's start with how. Yeah.

How we work, and I think this is a pretty obvious one. We know the way that we work is changing already. Mm-hmm.

And this is what I was talking about earlier, is we were trying to understand and decide with our customers what that's actually going to look like. And one of the announcements today was the new agentic Webex experience. Mm-hmm.

Right? And really what that is, is on the surface, it's a new user interface, right? That's a big piece of it.

It was. It's very new, but it's also very familiar to how people are kind of expecting to use very ChatGPT-esque- Mm-hmm ... that kind of interface at the front.

Well, that's what people are getting used to, right? Correct. It's changing.

That's right. That's what they want. Right.

Until they just start speaking to it. That's right. And they don't want to type or touch anymore.

That's right. And we know that's coming too, that voice- Sure is ... is making a comeback.

The whole human-computer interaction is just- For sure ... when you think about it, it's been a minute since Xerox PARC kind of invented the windows and mouse kind of thing. Yep.

So it might be time. Yeah, I know. Well, and we know the next generation, too, likes to use voice, right?

Yeah. They like to do that. They're used to talking to their devices.

And so we know that's coming, right? And so a big part of it's the interface. It starts out, it's got this familiar where you can kind of ask questions to Webex.

Mm. You'll get a daily brief. It'll surface things that are important.

That's really what people expect now. In plain English, you don't need to be- For sure ... a coder.

You don't need to be some kind of AI whiz or a prompt engineer or anything like that. Yeah, for sure. And that's one thing, by the way, that Webex is very good at.

Always been known for our very easy-to-use, simple user interface. So actually, this kind of new ChatGPT style chat interface is very Webex-esque already because we're already in that kind of simple space. Yeah.

So it fits really nicely in there. But I think the meat of the difference, though, so listen, anybody can change the interface. And which I think we've done a good job.

But the meat of the difference, though, is kind of our philosophy that people and agents working together in your meetings, in your spaces, that is the future, right? And so this is what I was saying before. How do we design?

How should that look? And that is what we're talking to customers about, and that's what we're announcing in the new experiences, that, look, we're creating the ability to have a Webex space. And you can bring multiple people in there, which you could always do, but you can also bring multiple agents in there as well.

So whatever, I think we showed today Figma, and ServiceNow, and GitHub, and all these different types of agents that you can have in a space. And I can add an agent, I can add agents in a space, and I can mention my agents, and I can get them working on something. And what they come back with, they share in the space.

And then you can go in there and mention the same agents and have them do the next task or something else. And back and forth we go, and the third person, and the fourth, right? And this is solving a big problem, honestly, because one of the barriers that we're already seeing in how we work is that I've got my own agents on my laptop.

I've got my own ChatGPT instance, or Claude instance, or whatever it is. Or both. Or both.

Exactly. I think everybody's got multiple subscriptions now. That is what's going on, yeah.

Which is fine. But mine's over here and yours is over there, right? And that's a problem for collaboration.

But in the future, we know what we need to do is we need to get something here in the middle so that you and I can both be working on the same thing with some of the same information going back and forth. Now, the trick is, and what's going to be really important, it's going to kind of be do or die for this is making sure that the permissions are right so that whatever is in there, that I can access what I'm supposed to access, you can access what you're supposed to access, et cetera. And that's the other thing that's kind of like the secret sauce of Cisco, as well as just that privacy and trust piece of it.

Because I don't want all my information coming into the space, and I don't want all my personal information in there, or every other project that one group's supposed to know about and another group is not supposed to know about, right? But that is what kind of the secret sauce is of Webex. Sure.

And us being a broader security company, part of Cisco is, is that we have that expertise to kind of make sure that that's happening right. Well, that was something I discussed earlier as well, is look, when you own the network, you have a bit of a leg up on security. And then when you have, I'll call it a decent observability platform in security- Yeah.

Sure ... well, you put that together with the network, now you're talking. Yeah.

Right? Absolutely. And so it does put you in a unique, not to say that you're making a Cisco-only world, right?

No. You got to be open. You got to be collaborative.

Yeah. Right. But as I think a football player once said, "If you got it, flaunt it," right?

Right. You have those tools. For sure.

So we talked about how. Yeah. I want to get to when, though.

Because as you said before, or is it the days are short, the years are long? Yeah. Or the days are long, the years are short?

It's one of those, but... The days are long and the years are short. Right.

Yeah. And so sometimes, we're not even realizing because we're in the eye of the storm kind of thing, right? We're not realizing all this change that's going around us, swirling around us, until you take back a little perspective.

Yeah. This vision that you've enunciated that Cisco and Jeetu, and everyone on the stage today spoke about, when? Yeah.

So I think that this new experience, this will be calendar year Q1 for us, right? So this is not a vision. This is very much going to be in the product, and it'll be available in just a few months.

Sure. So it's not a long-term thing. And obviously, listen, it'll evolve.

" Right? And I think we know that this is kind of the first iteration of this people and agents working together spaces. It's going to be the first pass.

We will learn a lot- Oh ... as we go. Iterate, reiterate, feedback loop, and iterate again.

For sure there will be something that's not perfect with the experience. And then, but again, what we mentioned is we have great customers that'll be testing this out. And actually, we're already testing some of this out as it is.

Yeah. We're already getting feedback on it, so we're not going to roll it out without testing it out. But we'll continue to get that feedback, and things will change, right?

In a couple of weeks or months, who knows what's going to get launched that's going to change the way that we have to do it anyways. And Cisco, we're very quick at this, and we'll kind of roll it out quick and update as we go. So that's the win.

I got an interesting take on where for you. Sure. So as I mentioned, I went on the tour yesterday of the office, and there's no doubt you guys nailed that, right?

It's a great experience. There are few companies, think like Apple- Yep ... right?

That really experience matters, right? Yep. That you open up that Apple box, you know you bought an Apple device.

Yep. You got that down at the place. But as you mentioned, we live in a hybrid world, a work-from-anywhere world.

I don't know if you'd call it Cisco at home, like there is such a thing. But how does this vision play when I'm not in a place where I have ubiquitous bandwidth, where I have a beautiful Webex, those monitors that go up and down- Yeah ... and you can kind of Star Trek-y.

How does that work? Yeah. For us, listen, Webex can be used anywhere.

And that's something that honestly, that is where a lot of the innovation came during the pandemic, right? Yeah. We had to get that right, and we had to get that right really quickly.

And I think we did. But I think what people seem to like about Webex is that whether you're in the office, or at your home, or in your car using Apple CarPlay- Mm-hmm ... whatever it is, there's a simple green button to hit, and you just join.

And by the way, we all at Cisco, I've been working at Cisco for 10 years. I work almost 100% remote or on the go. Do you?

Always I'm either in a hotel room or at my home office or at a friend's room. We're in both, yeah. It's the way of the world, I think.

But for me, honestly, my day doesn't really change. And that's what's great about it. It is the same wherever I go.

And I think that's an important component of a successful collaboration. For sure. Greg, I'd love to talk to you all day, but they're telling me we're almost out of time.

I apologize, man. Yeah. But first of all, thank you for putting on a great event here.

Yeah. I think the whole team has done a great job and really enunciated a vision, an intelligent vision for what's coming. And keep up the great work.

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for having me. Hey, man, pleasure.

Thank you. All right. Craig Burnham, Cisco, here at Webex One.

I think we have more coverage coming your way, so stay tuned. You're watching Techstrong TV.