As Cisco casts itself as the “critical infrastructure company for the AI era,” the company is repositioning Webex as the front-end experience for an AI-powered workforce, combining AI agents, collaboration, networking and workplace intelligence into a single platform.
Cisco Systems is repositioning its flagship collaboration platform, Webex, as more than just another meeting platform. Instead, the tech giant wants Webex to be the go-to environment for managing people and AI together and the place where work gets done.
Cisco’s latest announcements from its annual WebexOne 2026 collaboration event signal the company’s broader shift in strategy in which it’s betting that the future of work won’t just be humans collaborating with humans, but people collaborating with AI that’s capable of taking action and operating autonomously across the enterprise.
“People and agents working together is how collaboration is going to be done going forward … the user experience has to be fundamentally redefined and reimagined, and that is what Webex is becoming. It’s evolving into your work AI,” said Amit Barave, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Webex suite and AI, ahead of WebexOne 2026.
The shift is reminiscent of the approach Microsoft is taking with Copilot, said Joe Berger, vice president of digital experiences for World Wide Technology (WWT), one of Cisco’s top partners.
“Cisco needs to go in this direction of being where you live and work,” Berger said. “Where the updated Webex app is going, you’re going to actually interact with more of your agents and chat assistants and be sort of the hub of where work happens. I think it’s a smart move.”
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Cisco’s latest Webex announcements include AI agents answering calls, coaching employees on speaking and video presentations, translating conversations, working overnight on long-running tasks, collaborating with other AI agents and managing customer relationships. In addition to AI agents, Cisco is also pushing a vision of the workplace as a connected ecosystem rather than a collection of standalone rooms and technologies. By combining AI-driven workspace design, occupancy insights and network-based experience analytics, the company wants to give IT and facilities teams a single platform for planning, managing and optimizing workspaces and campuses, the company unveiled on Wednesday during WebexOne.
The challenge for Cisco is that many users are already entrenched in platforms they rely on every day, such as Microsoft Teams with Copilot, Berger said.
“We’re getting to a point where there’s all these different tools vying for that real estate on the desktop,” he said. “[Cisco] definitely has their work cut out for them to get there, but I do like the notion of them becoming sort of this workforce tool.”
The Infrastructure Behind The Intelligent Workplace
Cisco believes its networking, security and observability portfolio gives it an edge over pure-play collaboration rivals by tying collaboration into the broader enterprise technology stack, said Snorre Kjesbu, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration.
“Cisco has all of these components: networking, security, collaboration, devices spaces, and assurance. That means that every connection and device can add context to that larger picture. So, all of a sudden, you have a gold mine of data on which you can provide better experiences,” Kjesbu said.
As such, the tech giant is casting itself as foundational infrastructure for the AI era, arguing that organizations need the right architecture, platforms and tools to fully capitalize on AI. Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, said during the event’s keynote that the company is focused on solving the most important customer challenges and believes its expertise in networking, security and infrastructure gives it a unique vantage point to help enterprises adopt AI effectively at scale.
“The way you should think about Cisco is that we are the critical infrastructure company for the AI era,” Patel said. “Think about us like a picks-and-shovels company during the gold rush. We’re going to provide every organization with the right apparatus so that they can make the most out of AI.”
For WWT’s Berger, hearing Cisco leadership weave collaboration into the broader story of where the company is going is important.
“Talking about the new agentic workforce [and] pulling the collaboration and intelligent workspace stuff into that story is good. It needed that context [and] I think that’s the story Cisco needs to tell more because they can probably put that together better than anyone else can,” he said.
