AI features announced at Cisco Live San Diego 2025 reveal that the company continues moving the needle in a meaningful way on multiple fronts simultaneously – customer experience, devices, and hybrid work, as well as manageability and resilience.
Collectively the announcements allow companies to forge deeper bonds with customers, make employees more productive, and enable organisations to oversee their AI estates more effectively.
Customer experience the killer app for AI
Contact centres are converting from an orientation around human agents to including AI agents as well, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised.
Cisco believes that this transformation makes customer experience the killer app for AI and intends to embed the technology across its customer experience portfolio. Attention-grabbing announcements certainly bear this out such as templates used to create custom AI agents (coming Q3 2025), the ability of organisations to choose the large language models (LLMs) of their liking, and call summaries that enable agents to choose an appropriate internal expert to engage (expected in Q3 2025).
Cisco device strategy
The prominence Cisco has placed on the device experience is a key differentiator. The overarching theme of Cisco’s device strategy is not to merely provide technology, but instead to drive simple, inclusive experiences through technology. This was especially evident in two announcements. The Room Vision Pan Tilt Zoom (PTZ) camera, orderable in June 2025, provides realistic video quality and tracks meeting participants in small to large rooms. Zero-touch device provisioning (Q4 2025) enables faster device rollout and faster creation of more inclusive meeting experiences.
Included among the collaboration announcements were two areas that usually receive relatively little attention at major Cisco events relative to other areas such as customer experience and devices: manageability and resiliency. The most intriguing manageability announcement centred on features set to go into beta during Q3 2025 that enable organizations to measure their AI adoption and assess its impact. With respect to resiliency, the announcements were noteworthy for focusing on on-premise environments. Cisco has routinely touted itself as a cloud-first company, but those announcements shrewdly acknowledge that there is a world outside the cloud that needs to be supported.
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By GlobalDataHybrid work and agentic AI
There was a single, purely hybrid work announcement but it is worth mentioning for its incorporation of agentic AI, the latest craze on the AI front.
A meeting scheduler for Webex AI Assistant, slotted for beta in Q3 2025, can detect intention from a meeting summary and scan multiple calendars to create a proposed meeting date. This takes a mundane task off a user’s plate and allows them to focus on more important activities.
Cisco riding the winds of change
Taking a step back from the bells and whistles and viewing the announcements within a broader context yields some additional perspective. Cisco is riding the winds of change that have swept across team collaboration platforms.
The pandemic drove the ascent of these platforms, and competitors responded with successive rounds of feature wars. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and a ‘truce’ was issued in the form of interoperability between rival platforms. Now, things have come full circle to a degree with competitors reaching deep into the AI ‘treasure trove’ and circulating AI features platform-wide.
Cisco is seeking to separate itself from the pack by touting AI innovations across its entire portfolio whether software or hardware. Coupled with long-standing expertise in collaboration, networking, and security, Cisco enjoys a uniquely strong competitive position.
