As part of Cisco Live US 2026, the Cisco Collaboration team announced numerous capabilities spanning devices, AI agents, contact centres, and other areas. Cisco continues to support AI on a broad scale and possesses a differentiated capability set encompassing areas such as networking, security, and manageability to back that agenda.
Cisco is taking an all-consuming approach to AI at a corporate level, having completely oriented the organisation around the technology. Virtually every product and service offered bears an imprint of AI to one degree or another. Mirroring its parent, the Cisco Collaboration team has also placed AI at the centre of everything it does. Not only is that true regarding product features, but more importantly, AI informs the ‘delivery system’ that brings those products to ‘life’ and supports them ongoing, namely, the Cisco Webex platform.
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At a product level, the Cisco Collaboration team has demonstrated great dexterity, with AI permeating essentially everything offered across multiple domains: collaboration, contact centre, devices, and CPaaS. The momentum continued at Cisco Live 2026, with new and upcoming capabilities announced across most product categories.
Here are some examples. Coming in H2 2026, Cisco AI Agents for Collaboration understand intent, collect information, connect to business systems, apply business-specific logic, and automate multi-step processes. Cisco Collaboration Control Hub is in controlled availability in the US and encompasses tools to manage users, devices, workspaces, and collaboration services, providing insight across networking, collaboration, and security from one interface. Cisco AI Concierge for CX is a contact centre agent that orchestrates across knowledge bases, other AI agents, and enterprise systems to deliver deeply personalised customer conversations; it will be generally available in Q4 2026.
In addition to products, Cisco has infused AI into the various components underlying the Cisco Webex collaboration platform. Cisco sees contemporary collaboration platforms as having a fundamental role: “The system everything runs on.” Cisco brings together three underlying elements it thus deems to be “critical infrastructure”: security (trust, governance, auditability), intelligence (AI agents and context), and deployment models (cloud versus hybrid versus on-prem versus air-gapped).
What differentiates Cisco is ownership of every layer needed to actualise and sustain its various collaboration products. In addition to the Cisco Webex platform, the layers include the network, intelligence, switching architecture, security architecture, the management platform, the AI layer, and collaboration endpoints. While each layer exists elsewhere in the market, Cisco brings them all together.
Bottom line, Cisco is taking an expansive view of AI and leaving it to competitors to simply stockpile capabilities on their platforms.
