Each year Cisco hosts its WebexOne annual event to highlight new products, themes and overall announcements. The hybrid event includes everything great you would expect at an industry function: keynote speakers, breakout sessions, networking and more.

For the 2023 conference,  WebexOne chose to tackle big issues facing all organizations, selecting the theme “Everything AI, Hybrid Work & Customer Experience”. Featuring speakers including Neil deGrasse Tyson, Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Arianna Huffington, the conference dove into each of these pressing topic area, but ultimately, one theme prevailed…AI.

Specifically, the role that AI is playing in Webex products, how AI is impacting collaboration and even a Webex partnership to help power the next evolution of user experience. We’ll break this down and more below.

AI Assist Gets a Big Upgrade

You may be familiar with Webex’s AI Assist as it’s already embedded in many of Cisco’s collaboration devices. This year, Cisco announced a new set of AI features aimed at improving meeting collaboration and record keeping. First, the new AI Assist will provide automated meeting summaries organized into chapters and highlights. An improvement over traditional meeting transcripts, this feature aims to bring ease to creating meeting recaps as well as finding specific talking points from transcripts. Secondly, AI Assist will now include suggested responses to messages in chats, allowing meeting leaders to easily respond to inquiries without disrupting the meeting flow.

Finally, thanks to the addition of Slido Topic Summaries, meeting hosts can set up live polls to collect real-time feedback and interact with attendees on a large scale. It can analyze and summarize audience-submitted questions for a better Q&A experience. Cisco is planning to roll out all of the above features before the end of this year.

Meet the Cisco Room Kit EQX

While AI-powered software updates showed promise for the future of Webex, Cisco also announced the launch of a new collaboration hardware kit, the Room Kit EQX. Featuring advanced AV abilities such as camera intelligence to keep everyone perfectly framed, directional sound, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) capabilities, AI noise removal and seamless rich content sharing, Cisco is focused on creating a fully immersive meeting experience. As the Room Kit is designed for complete interoperability across third-party platforms, Cisco is focusing on removing the integration headaches that have characterized the last few years of video collaboration.

Cisco and Apple are Partnering Up

Aside from AI, Cisco had a number of relevant announcements including a new partnership with Apple to bring Webex to the range of Apple products. Soon, users will be able to run Webex meetings from an Apple TV, remotely access meetings from their own iPads and iPhones and even listen and participate in meetings using AirPods and their Apple Watch. With global statistics showing that nearly 1 in 4 smart devices are Apple products, including nearly 60% in the United States, this collaboration will not only redefine BYOD, but will also bring unprecedented approaches to meeting room functionalities.

There’s too much to say about Cisco’s great new announcements for one blog post, but overall, the company is dedicated to taking a big step toward next-gen meeting rooms. If you’re interested in discussing any of this great news or wanting to see how you can get your hands on some of these products, reach out to: helpme@roomready.com.