Cisco has closed the book on the 2026 chapter of WebexOne, its annual marquee event showcasing AI-powered enhancements to the Webex platform across collaboration, customer experience, and devices. Cisco picked right up where it left off from last year’s event, differentiating itself through a holistic approach to AI.
At a corporate level, Cisco has completely oriented the organisation around the technology. Cisco characterises itself as supplying the critical infrastructure for the AI era. Virtually every product and service bears an imprint of AI to one degree or another. Mirroring its parent, Cisco’s collaboration team has placed AI at the centre of everything it does. AI permeates every layer of the Webex platform and each product in the Webex portfolio.
What differentiates Cisco the most is ownership of every layer needed to actualise and sustain its various collaboration products. In addition to the Webex platform, the layers include the network, intelligence, switching architecture, security architecture, the management platform, the AI layer, and collaboration endpoints. While each layer can be procured from various vendors, Cisco brings them all together under one roof. This ensures the layers work seamlessly together and simplifies support, purchasing, life-cycle management, and cross-product enhancements.
In keeping with its overall AI mindset, Cisco is taking a broad view of agentic AI. Cisco believes that the advent of agentic AI drives a need to reimagine everything regarding collaboration. Collaboration has graduated from people-to-people interaction to people-to-AI interaction and is increasingly expanding beyond human participation in the form of AI-to-AI interaction (although human judgment and accountability remain key). Agentic AI drives how work gets done (people and agents together), where work gets done (rooms and building being infused with intelligence captured via convergence of networking, devices, and the management of both), and how customers are engaged (from contact to context).
To sum up, Cisco is taking an expansive view of AI and leaving it to competitors to simply stockpile capabilities onto their collaboration platforms. This broader perspective manifests itself in three ways: 1) Cisco is touting AI innovations across its entire portfolio, whether software or hardware; 2) Cisco has clearly and repeatedly articulated its AI strategy and vision; and 3) Cisco recognises that customers’ AI estates encompass more than just a single vendor’s platform and stretch well beyond their own four walls. Cisco’s approach to AI, coupled with long-standing expertise in collaboration, networking, and security, among other areas, provides the company a unique competitive position.
