Cisco unveiled new purpose-built Webex
artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities
that deliver unrivaled hybrid work experience as the new normal
continues to evolve. In a world where people demand exceptional,
personalized work experiences, organizations must meet both employees
and customers on their terms - while driving real value.
"AI presents the next evolution of hybrid work, holding the key to
unlocking a materially enhanced hybrid work and customer experience,"
said Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM, Security and Collaboration, Cisco. "Cisco
has decades of experience in AI with its industry-leading natural
language understanding, and audio and video intelligence in Webex, which
I'm thrilled is extending into even more innovations across our
collaboration portfolio. As we double down on our AI investment, we're
empowering our customers to deliver exceptional hybrid work and customer
experience outcomes based on their datasets, while relentlessly
protecting their confidentiality and privacy."
To deliver remarkable experiences for hybrid workers and customers,
Webex's innovations span three categories built on the Webex Platform,
which has a track record of hundreds of AI and machine learning features
already embedded in Cisco products.
Reimagining Workspaces
As employees increasingly come back to the office, great hybrid work
experiences require innovative use of video intelligence to ensure
everyone is able to participate equally when they collaborate. Building
on advanced AI capabilities already available in Cisco Collaboration
devices today, Webex is expanding its video-intelligence in its devices
through conference room operating system Cisco Room OS.
Users will benefit from the ability to automatically provide the most
optimal views in any meeting, at any moment, in any space with new
capabilities that deliver:
- Cinematic meeting experiences: With cinematic meetings
on Cisco Collaboration devices, cameras follow individuals through
voice and facial recognition, automatically switching views to capture
the best angle of the active speaker. This benefits people in the room
with immaculate focus on the speaker, and hybrid workers not in the
meeting room will feel included even if they are not physically in the
room.
- Meeting zones: With this capability, IT admins can
set virtual boundaries for any collaboration space in the office,
turning it into a meeting zone. With meeting zones, people are
individually framed in a condensed view - leaving any blank space out of
the view. Only people that are inside defined boundaries are included
in the meeting. This is critical in busy open spaces and in conference
rooms with glass walls, to eliminate the distraction of people outside
the meeting.
Optimizing Collaboration
In today's hybrid world, organizations must provide employees with
flexibility in when, where, and how they work - which requires
technology that best optimizes collaboration. As a testament to Webex
Calling's ability to deliver the flexible hybrid work technologies
organizations need, it's reached a new milestone of connecting over 10 million users, nearly doubling year-over-year growth. To further optimize collaboration, Cisco is introducing new AI capabilities in the Webex Suite, including:
- High-definition (HD) meetings that don't require HD bandwidth: Webex's
Super Resolution ensures crystal clear video in Webex meetings, even
with low-quality cameras or low bandwidth conditions.
- Smart re-lighting: To ensure people look their
best in any environment, smart re-lighting automatically improves poor
lighting when it's too dim or bright. For example, when working
outside on a sunny day, the appearance of underexposed video is adjusted
so the person appears more clearly.
- Automatic "be right back" update: This capability
automatically puts up a BRB message, blurs the background and mutes
audio when a user steps away from a Webex meeting. For example, if your
doorbell rings and you leave a meeting to pick up a delivery. The BRB
message is automatically removed once the user returns.
Maximizing Customer Experience
Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and organizations have
billions of interactions with customers daily. It's become impossible
for agents and legacy systems to keep up with the volume, velocity, and
disparity of interactions and the personalization required to address
this. Cisco leverages its same market-leading technology required for
Hybrid Work to fuel its Webex customer experience solutions.
Today, Cisco is unveiling its vision of the self-learning contact
center. Cisco is also introducing new AI capabilities for its customer
experience solutions, spanning Webex Contact Center and its cloud communications platform, Webex Connect. These new capabilities include:
- Actionable insights for improved CX: Topic Analysis in
Webex Contact Center surfaces key reasons customers are calling into
the contact center. It aggregates call transcript data from the contact
center and models trends succinctly for business analysts, so they can
proactively adapt to meet the needs of customers. This capability is
self-learning, constantly getting smarter from customer interactions.
- Agent Answers as a real-time agent coach: With
this capability, learnings from both self-service and automated customer
interactions are fed back into the self-learning contact center to
increase human agents' effectiveness. Agent Answers listens and acts as a
real-time coach for the human agent, surfacing knowledge base articles
and helpful information the agent can instantly provide the customer.
- Automated chat summaries for agents: AI-powered
chat summaries eliminate the need for agents to read lengthy digital
chat histories with customers to determine issues and resolutions
already explored. Agents will benefit from a faster, automated way to
consume long-form text from customer chats and provide key takeaways in a
quickly digestible format.
- Automated code for rapid customization of customer journeys: Today,
Webex's low-code flow builder capability in Webex Connect already helps
businesses orchestrate and automate end-to-end customer journeys. Now,
users will be able to simply describe the function they want to perform,
such as "validate an email address," and AI will generate and return
the appropriate code instantly. This makes it easier to create and
iterate customer journeys quickly.
New Webex AI capabilities are expected to roll out over the course of 2023.