WebexOne 2026 gave Cisco customers a lot to take in. Over three days in Austin, Cisco unveiled an all-new Webex App built around AI agents, confirmed that Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents will be able to join Webex spaces, meetings and calls, and brought Webex context into OpenAI’s dots through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration. It also launched Dialog for the contact centre and RoomOS 27, which brings native Google Meet to Cisco room devices from November.
Kevin Kieller, Co-Founder and Lead UC&C Strategist at enableUC, spent part of the week touring Cisco’s Austin office, where the company’s latest devices are deployed and connected across the building. As someone who measures collaboration usage for a living, he says the data coming off that estate stood out most.
All the devices deliver so much information, and Cisco is really stitching it together and helping people make sense of the analytics and make important business decisions around facilities.
Webex AI and Dialog: From Journey Management to Relationship Management
Kieller says AI dominated the announcements, with Cisco reimagining the Webex App to be more AI-centric and more personalised. How quickly customers adopt it will be the real test. In the contact centre, he points to Dialog and the idea that every customer gets a personal relationship manager, which he sees as Cisco moving from journey management into relationship management. Dialog’s agents carry context across channels and keep working after a conversation ends, and Cisco expects it to reach beta in the first quarter of 2027.
The keynote demos impressed him, as did the early customers who came on stage to explain how they are starting to use the technology. Much of that, he says, runs on analytics at a scale people cannot handle alone.
It’s too much for a human to deal with. But if AI is properly applied, it can help us make the right decisions on behalf of our customers, and on behalf of the knowledge workers and employees that are trying to use all of this.
Kieller says complexity has held collaboration technology back for years, because tools that are hard to use are hard to get people to adopt. The Austin office tour showed him the opposite, with much of the technology simply working in the background. “That’s all the magic we really want,” he says.
Voice and MCP Could Make the Collaboration App Interface Less Central
Kieller’s sharpest point concerns the app Cisco has just rebuilt. As voice becomes more of the user interface, he expects people to spend less time inside any vendor’s UI, Webex included.
