Cisco recasts Webex as the front end of its single AI platform

A team lead can now add an agent to a Webex space, meeting or call the same way she would add a colleague ^[7]. Glean CEO Arvind Jain, onstage with Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel, said that without knowing who is on the team and what was decided last week, agents "work like a day-one employee" ^[10]. SiliconANGLE's analyst wrote that Cisco is "trying to own where the work happens" ^[18].

The pitch on stage covered far more than the meeting. Patel's underlying message, as SiliconANGLE summarized it, was that if agents run everywhere, someone has to build and secure the infrastructure beneath them ^[17]. Six years ago, he said, Cisco "looked much more like a holding company than a platform company" ^[3]. According to Patel, Cisco Cloud Control took nine months to assemble, and it now serves as the management plane across Cisco's entire product line, with Cisco Data Fabric covering data and Silicon One covering silicon ^[4]. "We will all be feature managers, not product managers, because all we're doing is building features for the platform," Patel said ^[19]. SiliconANGLE's analyst, who has heard Cisco talk about platforms for years, wrote that "this is the first time the org chart, sales compensation and roadmap point in the same direction" ^[6].

Sales compensation is the part that reaches a Webex renewal ^[6]. If the account team is paid on the platform, it has a reason to bring network and security into a conversation about meeting seats.

WebexOne still gave unified communications and contact center their share of the stage ^[20]. But the platform pitch expects users to hand meeting context to agents. According to SiliconANGLE's analyst, Cisco can add something other collaboration vendors lack: data from Splunk, security and networking that shows what users are doing and where they are located ^[22]. The account does not include Webex pricing or any count of customers running agents in meetings today.

Patel's cost figures fall to whoever owns the agent. He said an agent uses 450% more network bandwidth than a human doing the same task ^[12], about 5.5 times as much ^[21]. He also said 60% of global compute this year will go to inference ^[13]. "The costs of tokens coming down are nowhere near the demand going up," Patel said. "So all of us are going to have a human budget as well as a token budget" ^[14]. Jain called that unusual. "Technology is always supposed to be a fraction of the cost of your labor," he said. "It cannot be like this forever" ^[16].

What you are actually buying depends on whether agents will join your meetings during the next contract term, and whether Cisco already runs your network or security. No agents and no Cisco network means you are buying a meetings product, and the platform is roadmap. A Cisco network without agents puts the change in front of your network team first, through Cloud Control and the brand consolidation Patel described ^[4]. Agents without a Cisco network make this an integrations purchase, and you pay for tokens without the Splunk and network data that is Cisco's distinguishing asset in this pitch ^[22]. Both together make you the buyer the keynote was written for, with a token line in the collaboration budget and Patel's bandwidth figure falling to the team that already plans the network ^[12].