Cisco Cognitive Collaboration – what does it mean for your business?

Last month, Cisco introduced a range of new artificial intelligence (AI) features for Webex under the banner of Cognitive Collaboration. Together, these promise to elevate smart meetings to a whole new level.

Cisco defines Cognitive Collaboration as:

“Context and intelligence woven throughout all collaboration experiences. This fosters human relationships, enhances customer interactions, and builds high-performance teams across boundaries to make smarter and faster decisions and allow you to serve your customers better”.

In other words, Cisco has embedded AI and machine learning across Webex so users can organize and start meetings more easily, benefit from additional insight into other participants, and turn virtual meetings into truly collaborative experiences. On a more technical level, Webex will now apply machine learning to raw data from your collaboration and enterprise environments and provide helpful context about your meeting in real-time.

What’s new?

Cisco has added three ultra-practical new features to the Webex Platform under the banner of Cognitive Collaboration:

• Proactive Join: with Proactive Join, users of Webex Assistant are proactively asked if they want to join a meeting as they enter a meeting room, saving them the hassle of setting up and dialing in. The feature combines calendar data with Cisco’s Intelligent Proximity technology, which draws data on employees’ location from their mobile phones and workstations. Proactive Join is available on a limited basis for now but will sit across the entire Webex Suite by June.
• First Match: First Match uses conversational AI to help you connect with the right person using voice commands. For instance, if you ask Webex to “Call Jane,” the feature will scan Webex Teams and your company’s directory to make the best guess about who you want to contact. According to Cisco’s Keith Griffin, Webex offered users three recommendations during field trials, but the feature proved so accurate that customers simply asked for the first match.
• People Insights: One of the most powerful new features of Webex, People Insights pulls a combination of internal and web data about users to create living, breathing profiles for each meeting participant. This provides valuable context about who you’re speaking with, their network, and the latest news about their company, promoting deeper and more informed conversations with both colleagues and customers.

On top of these features, Cisco plans to bring advanced facial recognition capabilities to Webex by June. The AI-based system will display a name tag under each user, bringing an additional level of personalization to the meeting experience.

It’s only natural that Cisco is moving in this direction. Gartner recently predicted that 40 percent of meetings would be enhanced by virtual concierges and analytics by 2022, and as an industry, our aim is to make virtual collaboration as good as the real thing. With its new range of practical solutions, Cisco has taken a major step in that direction.

Learn more about Cisco Cognitive Collaboration and what it can do for your business. And click here to see how Stack8 can help.