Webex One 2024 – Cisco concentrating on its key areas of strength

Webex One provided the impressive conduit for Cisco to reaffirm its focus on key strategic areas including its calling portfolio, devices, and contact centre. Cisco arguably boasts the most comprehensive communication portfolio, especially from the perspective of its communication delivery partners

More than 15,000 virtual attendees joined more than 2,000 people in attendance on site, for Webex’s annual conference. Amid a host of news releases and updates the most apparent theme, from a Cavell perspective at least, related to Cisco and Webex’s dedication to consolidation on its key areas of strength: the Webex suite, its device portfolio, and its wider networking portfolio.

Cisco has also managed to consolidate the underlying platform across the Webex suite, allowing it to align with the wider industry vogue trend: embedding artificial intelligence across the software suite and more widely into its hardware devices. Webex is now a single platform, a single design, with a single suite of APIs, not all vendors in communications can also cite this advantage.

Doubling down on customer experience

Webex Contact Centre is experiencing impressive growth. YOY there has been 75% growth in cloud contact centre licenses and in the same time frame, 50% growth in the number of contact centre customers. Many might assume that all of this growth comes from the migration of customers from Cisco’s substantial existing global base of premises-based contact centre customers and users. But that isn’t the case. Around 30% of Webex Contact Centre wins now come from net new logos to Cisco, an impressive proportion considering Cisco’s traditional prevalence and strength in the contact centre space. Updates within Webex Contact Centre were one of the main focuses during the event.

Firstly, there was the announcement of Webex AI Agent. Cavell’s own research aligns with Cisco’s and has shown that consumer perceptions of current automated customer service solutions are poor. Cavell’s Voice of the Consumer Report 2024 found that more than 35% of consumers consider automated systems to provide ‘bad’ service.

Cisco has also registered this issue and reacted with Webex AI Agent. The full self-service ‘concierge’ autonomous digital agent will work across chat and voice communication channels using natural dialogue and conversational intelligence to assist in query resolution. Webex AI Agent can even help with more proactive assistance capabilties such as suggestion prompts. Cisco demonstrated this capability in voice calls where the AI agent handled complex questions from hypothetical customers. Cisco has managed to overcome lots of the common issues associated with AI agents, Webex AI Agent can be interrupted, thrown topic curve balls and can still accurately answer queries in a convincing human manner. So human in fact, that many of the attendees questioned whether the Webex AI Agent demonstrations were actually human actors!

Webex AI Agent can be designed and built by customers using the Webex AI Agent Studio. This allows customers to design and customise their own AI agents, controlling access to data sources and guard rails according to any business’ own policies. Webex AI Agent can be pointed to various internal or external data sources, with support for Microsoft SharePoint documents in the imminent pipeline.

“Customer experience can make or break a brand, and unlike other solutions on the market, the Webex AI Agent solves customer problems instantaneously and will fundamentally transform the experiences we have all reluctantly been using for far too long,”

 – Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco.

On launch, Webex AI Agent will be available in 8 languages, but Cisco are already developing support for additional languages. Furthermore, Cisco is exploring interfaces for integrations with other 3^rd party contact centre systems. The prospect of Webex AI Agent being used on top of a competitor’s CCaaS solution looms in the future.

As well as focusing on virtual agent capability, Cisco also reaffirmed its commitment to support human agents through AI Assistant. This technology will be able to help human agents with suggested responses and the automation of tasks. Both of these additions to the Webex Contact Centre proposition will become generally available in Q1 2025.

These news announcements from Cisco reaffirm its commitment to customer experience (CX). This reflects a much wider trend Cavell had been noting within the industry. As unified communications becomes more commoditised, vendors are pivoting to CX. Cisco requires less of a pivot with Webex, despite the rapid development it has experienced, due to its history and experience in the contact centre space.

It’s also worth noting that Cisco is continuing its focus on ‘CX light’ or the informal CX market with even more capabilities following the additions to Webex Essentials, that we documented during last year’s event. Webex Calling can also expect live summaries and post call summaries which will also be coming Q1 2025. Helping users across an organisation, not just agents in the contact centre.

These updates should ensure that Webex Contact Centre continues to experience considerably above industry standard growth rates.

Cisco on the cutting edge with spatial meetings?

We have an internal debate at Cavell about the relevance of mixed reality within business communications. Currently the relevance is undeniably limited. However, Cisco appears to be one of the few vendors looking ahead at the longer-term future of communications. One relevant area of technology will undoubtedly be the realms of mixed reality (XR).

At Webex One, Cisco announced and demonstrated this by integrating Apple Vision Pro in its latest Cisco Spatial Meetings. This development may transform remote collaboration hoping to replicate in-person interactions to make remote meetings more immersive, engaging, and productive.

“We are at the beginning of this journey – when you think about how you can collaborate, spatial conferencing will take it to an entirely new level. We are going to be able to bring people together in a way we havent been able to do before.”

– Mike Rockwell Leader of Apple Vision Products, Apple

Apple’s Vision Pro augments visuals on top of the real world and now Cisco is embracing that with its own spatial meetings. Cisco primarily sees the key verticals that this might be most relevant for as education, healthcare, and retail. Currently augmented reality (AR) use cases, in a professional context, are limited, but this is unlikely to be the case in the long term. Particularly as younger generations progress through the workforce and embrace emerging technolgies, as Cavell’s generational research has explored in other areas.

This news really does distinguish Cisco from other communication providers. Early investment and focus in an emerging tehcnology area, such as XR, may prove to pay off in the long run.

It’s important to note that there were also a slew of other device related announcements and launches: Cisco Ceiling Microphone Pro and its Workplace Designer. Cisco said during last year’s Webex One that devices were a key strategic tool for trying to attract and win new collaboration, calling, and contact centre customers, via a land and expand strategy. Since Webex One 2023 there have been 4k+ new Cisco device customers. Traction in replacement goal is more difficult to measure, but Cisco did reveal that it has also made progress in devices with Microsoft Teams.

Only 18 months ago Cisco announced support for Microsoft Teams’ meetings on its devices. Since then, Cisco room devices have become the fastest growing Microsoft Teams Room partner in the last 12 months, with more than 3 thousand customers using Cisco devices with Microsoft Teams meetings. Impressive, considering the device competition in this space. How it will translate to potentially displacing Microsoft Teams as a collaboration solution is yet to be quantified.

Cisco further develops its mobility options

So far, Cavell is tracking relatively limited traction in FMC and mobile UC solutions, outside of particular regions such as the Nordics. This is despite a focus from industry leaders such as Microsoft, with Teams Phone Mobile, and Cisco, with Webex Go. Still, Cavell forecast that by 2028, 3 million mobile-centric users – with native mobile network integration – will be deployed in the United States alone.

Cisco is now expanding its delivery options for Webex Go. Up until now Webex Go has been limited as its GTM through partnership with select mobile providers or through Cisco directly. Now Cisco is expanding this with a select group drawn from its 45 Cloud Connect Partners.

NTT, Pure IP, NUWAVE, AudioCodes, CallTower, and Momentum will now be able to offer Webex Go to their customers as an additional service alongside their fixed-line Webex Calling portfolios; Webex Calling has seen significant traction in the market, now boasting more than 16 million users globally. Now, these Cloud Connect Providers (CCP) will be able to sell their PSTN connectivity with the mobile plans their customers want, now being able to offer SMS & roaming capability. Cisco and the CCP partners have focused on adding these functions alongside and emphasis on simplicity of deployment, administration, and usage. These have been traditional barriers to the adoption of mobile UC soltuions. This latest development removes some of the inhibitors that have contributed to slower than forecast mobile UC adoption.

Environmental considerations and cisco’s wider strategy

It should also be noted that there was also an unusual weight placed on environmental sustainability within Webex One, compared to other similar vendor events. Admittedly, this focus generally related to Cisco’s expansive device portfolio – with emphasis on manufacturing materials, power consumption, and environmental design principles – but it did also extend to considerations of Cisco’s environmental responsibility in other areas. These include storage and compute resources in its data centres and networking assets, especially with its increasing use of artificial intelligence.