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The Collaboration Space
Demystifying Agentic AI with Cisco
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Agentic AI can anticipate needs and support users in real time, transforming how organizations collaborate and operate. It represents the next step in the evolution of AI.
In this episode of The Collaboration Space, AVI-SPL’s Mathew DeFreitas talks with Cisco’s David Beisly about what Agentic AI means for the workplace. They also discuss how Cisco and AVI-SPL are preparing organizations for what comes next.
Key conversation takeaways
- Agentic AI is here to go beyond the meeting space, proactively assisting users without waiting for a prompt
- It can support meeting follow-up, workplace navigation, space optimization, service resolution, and more
- David Beisly highlights how Cisco and AVI-SPL can help organizations build systems with the future of AI in mind
- Cisco is already integrating Agentic AI across its ecosystem with AgenticOps, AI Canvas, AI Assistant, among others
Learn more about how Cisco and AVI-SPL are helping organizations embrace agentic AI.
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Welcome back to the collaboration space. I'm your host, Matthew Defratis. And today we're diving into agentic AI and how it can be used today. I mean, we've explored the benefits of AI in general on this podcast quite a bit, from the hybrid meeting experience to generative AI and its impact on individuals in the workplace. But today we're taking a look at the new phase of AI, if you will, agentic AI. It's new, and when something's new, it can inspire many questions. So I've got David Beasley from Cisco joining me today to discuss this topic and dive into the details. David, welcome to the collaboration space.
SPEAKER_01Hi Matthew, how are you?
SPEAKER_00I'm well. Thank you so much for joining me again. I'm excited to dive into this topic with you. So I'm just gonna uh quickly ask, though, um, you know, can you give us some background on your role at Cisco and uh, you know, share uh a little bit about yourself?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've so I've been with Cisco for about 15 years now and started as uh on the graduate program actually many a year ago. And uh that took the form of then moving into a generalist essay covering all of Cisco's architectures. Um and then around 2020 moved into a collaboration specific role, whereas a collaboration solutions and solutions engineer, excuse me, uh, and very recently moved into a systems engineer leader role covering uh our EMIR channel partners uh and all things collaboration across it.
SPEAKER_00So you're a you're a seasoned Cisco veteran, if you will.
SPEAKER_01Uh there are people with longer tenures for sure, but it's as far as it goes, it's not too bad 15 years uh as an innings.
SPEAKER_00Well, I'm excited to chat with you today. Uh thank you for that background on uh your story at Cisco. Um so let's dive into AI in collaboration. You know, can you kind of give us a quick, quick, you know, 30-second run through, if you will, of the you know, the AI tools today and you know the generative AI experience that we're all used to?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. And it we think in Cisco that AI is uh in collaboration is one of the most fruitful areas. It's one of the most obvious, especially when we talk to things like the customer experience side of things and what it can deliver there. So we're really taking the approach of where we can sprinkle AI into the entire collaboration portfolio, where it makes sense to do and where it adds real value to the end users. And so we're starting to see agentic AI coming out in lots of different ways, which I think we're gonna go into in the next sort of phase of this conversation. But it's got to be where it makes sense and it's got to be where it adds value. Otherwise, nobody's gonna use these things. And so we really invest in time to make sure that we're giving the right experience for the end user, us, because we're the consumers of the technology at the end of the day, and it has to add value there, but also to the IT operational side of things, so the owners of the services, if you will, and where again it can add value, make their lives simpler, deployments, management, all those kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00And so looking at where we're at currently, and as we're starting to transition into that new phase of AI with you know, agentic AI specifically, but looking at today in our collaboration spaces, in our huddle rooms, in our training rooms, where where the common spaces are common technologies rather are you know, we're seeing that pop up more and more, uh being more and more embedded rather in you know PTZ cameras, uh in our in our our collaboration platforms. Can you speak to how you know Cisco uh uses uh AI in its solutions?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And so in the meeting spaces, for example, we you may have just seen uh we had WebEx1 a couple of weeks ago when we rolled out things like dynamic camera view. And this this really addresses some of those simple problems, but uses the agentic AI side of things built into our devices to identify what is the best frame to send, what is the best view to send to the far end? And so we're using the capabilities built into the devices to enhance that experience in the meeting room. We we have a phrase in Cisco called distance zero, which means, you know, you you're uh I apologies, I forget where you are in the US, but how can we make this conversation as natural, uh a feeling of conversation as if we're across the table as possible? And the way we can use AI is to bridge a lot of those gaps from an audio and a visual perspective. Um again, coming back to that dynamic camera view is a great first start because it takes away that per process from the end user, which is monotonous and requires training and people don't do it. And you know, you had to go in and find the right camera view and switch in. Why does an end user care about that? They want the best experience, they don't want to have to think about the technology. And so if we can let the technology take care of itself, we're in a much better place from an experience perspective, from an end user uh perspective, which means they're gonna have a better experience when it comes to these kind of things um working together.
SPEAKER_00And the way I kind of think about what you just described, it's kind of almost using AI to help the technology almost fall into the background of a hybrid meeting conversation.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. We've we've always said that if the technology is doing its job correctly, you don't know it's there. If I can fall into a conversation that's as natural as if we're sat across the table, I'm gonna have a much better conversation than if I'm sat here worrying about is the camera picking me up in the right way? Am I sending good audio? What is going on? I don't need to think about that. I need to let the technology take care of those elements so that we can just get on with having a great experience and a great conversation because that's what's important to me, not what I'm sat in front of.
SPEAKER_00So speaking of great experiences, let's dive in a little bit to that new phase of AI, uh, agencai. You know, when I think of great experiences, you know, I think of the meeting place, I think of that, you know, the the my collaboration needs are met, I'm, you know, the the technology's falling into the background. But I'm also thinking about, you know, my own personal needs, you know, and making the work life easier beyond the workplace. The can you speak to that, how agentic AI helps there and in other ways throughout the workplace?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and the the promise of agentic AI is allowing these systems to start working together and start making these, uh, I wouldn't say necessary decisions on your behalf, but certainly making recommendations on the behalf of the end user as an example. How can we work out how we can schedule a meeting in our company without me having to go and pull all these bits of data together from multiple systems that says you're available, then you're a better, and then have to make pull all those bits of information together, as said, make some decisions on that and look at it. That should be a really, really simple task, but the monotony of somebody doing that, going to an Outlook invite, typing in all the names, then you get the scheduler, and then we can reduce that down to a really, really simple process. Uh and so things like that are really where this kind of promises to take off. And so that's where it becomes very, very tangible, I would say, for an end user like us to start consuming these technologies. And then you can see how that could fall over into your personal life as well outside of this. And so when you start thinking about how you interact with a contact center experience, for example, and an agentic AI experience there would be that actually I can go and dial into my contact center and I can ask it questions, and it can then go and retrieve that information, pull that back for me. And so, again, that process becomes really, really simple. Uh, almost dare I say it, an enjoyable process to dial into a contact center again, which has always been one of the biggest pain points. You only phone into a contact center when you're upset. We need to make sure they can have a great experience and achieve what they need immediately. And so those kind of technologies would then fall into us as consumers of the technology, because I can go in, I can make these systems work together, I can pull out bits of information from different areas of my own business, which then benefit you as the person dialing into that contact center environment to again make uh simplify your life, get you the information you want quicker, um, and leave you as a happy customer, which is ultimately the end game for those kind of technologies in the contact center space.
SPEAKER_00So just to quickly add on to that, you know, I I see a ton of benefit to the employee of the workplace, the customer, the client, uh, all those different relationships that you might have. It's gonna speed up everything that we do and it's gonna make our lives easier, as you said. I'm curious how Agentic AI makes life easier for IT and you know, IT operations. Can you speak to that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And it's as I said, it's one of the big areas we focus on from a scaling perspective and how we can help people to deploy these technologies even easier, but also how they can manage and monitor them. Uh, and as an example, one of the biggest challenges we see as Cisco, and I'll go back to the meeting room space, is that you know, people are deploying more and more video. But how do we know that that space is apparently optimized? How do we know somebody hasn't dumped some rubbish in there? How do we know people are haven't done things with the tables and chairs, which is going to mess with the experience in there? And so we can use the capabilities we have in into the devices, and we're thinking, well, if we've got all these different sensors in here, then we can start to understand the environment better and then have that talk to something else. So maybe we can um use the cameras that uh you know are sat in there to understand and use the intelligence behind that. What is the layout of the room? Do we need to change the audio because of that? What's the cameras picking up? Um, how can we make sure that the experience is optimized as that somebody hasn't changed something? And so we're looking at it from that perspective to really make sure that we can identify any challenges from an end user perspective that might be in the room, but also then look at that from a um troubleshooting perspective as well. So if we do run into challenges, how can we have our video room devices talking to our network side of things to make sure that something's happened? We need to remediate very, very quickly because guess what? There's about to be a big board meeting, and that's always when things go wrong, right? And so anything we can do there from an agenda KI perspective, from our video devices talking to the network, talking to the service provider network, and pulling that information back and being able to talk across those different agents to get to a resolution in a much, much faster state, uh, much, much faster time, excuse me, is a real benefit to our end customers and to the end users again, because we again they just want to consume the service. They don't want to care about these different things. So the agents talking to each other across all those different aspects of where the technology touches is how we think and how we see from an operational perspective we can have a real impact on moving forward uh with and resolving some of these challenges.
SPEAKER_00Well, and it seems as well, you know, resolving challenges for today, but also thinking about tomorrow as well. So it seems like agentic AI is very much ideal uh for helping IT uh build an eco, a future-ready ecosystem, if you will.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we've we're kind of looking at, and this is roadmap for very far out next year, um, fingers crossed, is something called the AI Canvas, which does exactly kind of what I was talking to there. So we have a challenge, we can go into our tools and we can identify that, but it's then using that age entity capability to query across the different pieces uh where the technology might be touching and pulling that information back. So we can very quickly resolve, we can uh it can then make those recommendations for us and then push out that information on what we need to change. And so you can automate a lot of those processes, which make it very, very difficult to uh uh to aggregate those bits of information is probably the right way of phrasing it.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for diving into that. Speaking of, you know, how is spe speaking of the Canvas, how else is Cisco, you know, diving in uh to a genetic AI? Or I should say leading the charge into AI.
SPEAKER_01So you can also look at it from a kind of security perspective as well. Uh, not necessarily my my massive forte, but uh it's one of the areas again where we see there could be tons of value um in what we're doing and how we can again bring these bit different bits of information. So it for example, ensuring secure collaboration, for example. So integrating threat detections, maybe for synthetic medias and deepfakes, those kinds of things, as well. We can see we can use um agentic AI to bring in um that greater level of trust policy across what we're doing. Uh, one one particular big big area that I see, as I said, uh, and also integrating um AI assistant into workflow automation. So let's say you're in a room and you have an issue, and maybe or you're on a conversation or whatever, and you want it to then start looking at an open JIRA tickets or query Microsoft Copilot as part of that as well. So that's where the Cisco AI agent could then query Copilot. So you can again bring additional value by integrating these different agents which talk to different parts of your business. So there's just a couple of other areas uh off the top of my head that we're looking at that will add a lot of value to our own customers.
SPEAKER_00David, thank you for your uh your your insight there on the very the various ways that Cisco is uh diving into agentic AI. You know, how can organizations benefit from an AVI, the ABI SPL and Cisco partnership uh if they're looking to embrace agentic AI?
SPEAKER_01Which is a really, really good question because uh what we're seeing and what we're finding is that customers aren't really, don't really have a great AI AI strategy right now, and they're really looking at uh and looking for guidance around that. And so um, along with our partners, uh and of course that means you guys, uh AVI SPL, we're looking at how we can deliver AI assessments into our customers and what that might mean for them to really help try and strategize and paint a great picture for how they can leverage AI in their workspace and what that could mean for them moving forward. So it's really a case of understanding where they are as an organization and what these tasks are that they're gonna want it to start looking at moving forward. And that's why we've implemented this AI assessment so that we can partner up with you guys to help us get out there in front of the customers and deliver these assessments for them so they can start on that journey.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we we look forward to working with you and helping those organizations uh get on that journey and uh build out their future ready ecosystems. Um, David, I just want to thank you again for joining me today and for breaking down the exciting new ways Agentic AI can impact the workplace.
SPEAKER_01Pleasure, Matthew. Thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks again to everyone watching and listening. Thank you for joining us in the collaboration space. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel, AVISPL Info, or you can search the collaboration space on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time in the collaboration space. For more information, visit avispl.com slash sisco.