Watching late last night on the last day of September 2025, from my living Room (wishing I was there), I tuned into the keynote from Cisco Weex One 2025.
Every year, Cisco WebexOne feels like a pulse check on the state of collaboration from one of the global big three collaboration and meeting platform vendors. This year, incase you had been asleep for the last 12 months), Cisco made it clear: The world is shifting beyond chatbots , with the new frontier being agentic AI – autonomous digital teammates designed not just to answer questions, but to take action on our behalf. We are seeing this everywhere!
We’re squarely in the next era of AI where we’re moving from this notion of chatbots that intelligently answer our questions to agents that are going to conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on our behalf.
Jeetu Patel | President and CPO | Cisco
Whilst the event continues this week and with other global Collaboration events taking place across the globe, the focus was very much agents agents everywhere…
Webex – Agents, Agents Everywhere
Cisco unveiled a suite of new AI agents that they say feel less like bolt on AI features and more like colleagues or team mates, possible through the huge advances in AI models and reasoning in the last year alone. These Cisco first party agents include:
- Task Agent – Which can automatically generates action items from meeting summaries. This will be available in Q1 of 2026.
- Notetaker Agent – which captures and summarise in-person huddles in real time without the need for a formally scheduled meeting. This will be built into Cisco RoomOS 26 and will also be Generally Available in Q1 of 2026.
- Polling Agent – nothing to do with elections! This agent can suggests live polls mid-meeting to capture sentiment and input leveraging slido. Again also also GA in Q1 2026.
- AI Receptionist – this will provide the ability to act as a true virtual front desk receptions for businesses. Built on Webex Calling, it will be able to handle queries, transfers, and scheduling of meetings or call backs and even handle “standard” enquiries. This will start beta testing and controlled rollout from Q1 2026. .
- Meeting Scheduler – scan meetings and be able to suggest or proactively turn action items into automated scheduling. This should be be GA before Xmas so you don’t forget to book those new year meetings!
These subtle first party AI ingestion is not just about incremental productivity and keeping up with jones’ (though the other big two have similar), but it’s more about smart and intelligent delegation and follow up – handing off the admin so people can focus on the work that matters and not forget to follow up on meetings.
RoomOS 26: biggest update ever.
Cisco also unveiled some big updates to their RoomOS (the OS that powers their meeting room devices), claiming it is their biggest, richest release yet. Coming in this update we will see, yes more agents including:
- Director Agent – which can anticipate meeting flow and dynamically adjusts camera views for a more engaging, cinematic experience.
- Workspace Agent – Uses (Nvidia) AI to optimise physical workspace setups, proactively recommending improvements.
- Audio Exclusion Zones – allows and can automatically configure digital boundaries to block out background noise and distractions using AI and noise cancelling technologies which I’d argue Cisco do better than anyone!
Again, these are subtle but important features, placing AI into meetings in a subtle yet important way. It’s all about making the meeting room experience just work with minimal manual configuration and tweaking in meeting.
Troubleshooting Gets Agentic Too
Just like with saw with AI Canvas in Cisco networking at Cisco live, Cisco have been busy behind the scenes too.
Cisco is extending its AI Canvas into Webex Control Hub, enabling multi-domain troubleshooting through natural language.
Think of it as a collaborative whiteboard for IT teams, powered by Cisco’s Deep Network Model. This won’t be available until the back end of 2026 but brining network, security and now Collab and meetings together into a since AI canvas is going to be huge for proactive issue resolution.
For any organisation that is already invested or investing in Cisco for their infrastructure stack this is huge and a great compete angle for Cisco where together really can be better!
Expanded Open Ecosystem
Cisco clearly recognise the power of a connected eco system and meeting customers where they are in terms of the wider technology vendors and eco systems they are investing in. Cisco continues to leaning hard into openness, with more integrations that would have been unthinkable a few years back.
- Microsoft Copilot – Yes… More Microsoft integrations. Users will be able to search across SharePoint and OneDrive directly from Webex, while Copilot users can pull in Webex meeting summaries.
- Zoom for Cisco Rooms – Cisco are brining a huge update to how the Zoom experience works on Cisco devices, moving away from the “nasty” WebRTC experience.
- Salesforce and Amazon CCaaS – Webex Contact Center will bring new native integration with Salesforce CRM data as well as Amazon Lex.
This isn’t Cisco versus the world in a closed eco system.. Not anymore. This is Cisco with the world and with your tech!
Customer Experience Gets Smarter
Cisco is also betting big and continuing to innovate in their Webex Contact center portfolio: I will cover more on this in a later blog, but in summary, they are adding:
- AI Quality Management (QM) – which wl empower supervisors to coach both human and AI agents from a single platform. – GA Q1 2026.
- Webex Contact Center for Salesforce CRM – this is already in early access now with GA expected late Q1 2026.
- Amazon Lex Integration – Available now immediately, enabling smarter call routing and intent recognition.
- Microsoft Teams – just mentioning as I get asked a lot. This is all ready fully supported as a Teams certified Contact Centre.
Customer experience is no longer about managing queues and IVRs. it’s about orchestrating intelligence and line of business workflow integration and automation.
My Take
WebexOne 2025, as expected was about updates and AI infusion. The focus for me was refinement in the way Cisco do best. No gizmos and pointless features just maturity, evolution and AI in the right places, along with true customer choice and openness. Cisco sprinkling of AI across their suite was all about agency—giving AI the ability to act, not just advise, which of course shifts the course of AI just being a human advisor to taking actions… That’s also a whole other topic of conversation!
For IT, Customer Service and Business Leaders, this is all about trust: how much autonomy are we willing to give an AI agent? How much do we trust it, will out customers and who’s in control and accountable. For users, it’s about relief: less admin, more impact and more customer impacting time.
Cisco’s bet continues to be bold, but it’s also pragmatic. By further opening up and integrating their ecosystem to Microsoft, Zoom, Salesforce, and AWS, they are acknowledging that the future of collaboration isn’t about vendor battles it’s about platform, cohesion and interconnection.
The era of chatbots is over. The era of agents has begun.