The WebexOne 2026 keynote in Austin covered a lot of ground in one morning. Cisco unveiled a rebuilt Webex App with Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents on the way, Dialog for the contact centre, RoomOS 27 for its room devices and a new ceiling speaker, launches aimed at three different sets of buyers.
Snorre Kjesbu, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration, told UC Today after the keynote that a single shift connects them.
The big idea tying all of this together is that agents are entering the workforce, and that's a major shift.
Cisco arrived in Austin with momentum behind that message. In August, Collaboration posted its best quarter in seven years, growing 12% year on year with video devices up 40%. A week earlier, Cisco was named a Leader in Gartner's 2026 UCaaS Magic Quadrant for the eighth consecutive year.
From Contact Centre to Context Centre: Where Cisco Is Deploying AI Agents
Kjesbu says Cisco is putting agents to work in three places. The first is the all-new Webex App, rebuilt so people can work alongside agents directly. Claude Managed Agents will soon be able to join spaces, meetings and calls as team members.
The second is the contact centre, which Kjesbu says is moving "from contact centre to context centre", with agents drawing on every call, text and email a customer has had with a brand. That is the job of Dialog, the agentic harness for Webex AI Agent, which Cisco expects to reach beta in the first quarter of 2027. The third is devices, where RoomOS 27 brings AI to the edge in November, including an AI Assistant that understands 32 languages.
Why Shared Context Turns AI Assistants Into Digital Teammates
Kjesbu says the difference between an assistant and a teammate shows up after the meeting ends. When he started his career, meetings were isolated events. People left to do their actions, or often didn't do them at all, and then reconvened. Agents turn that into a continuum, carrying on the work and coordinating with each other once everyone has left the room.
You won't bring just one agent into the workplace. You'll have a whole myriad of them.
Those agents can be the user's own, Cisco's, or another vendor's. Microsoft has taken a different route. Gartner's 2026 evaluation again flagged Copilot as a potentially expensive add-on outside standard UCaaS licensing, while Cisco is opening Webex to Anthropic's Claude and adding an MCP integration with OpenAI's dots. For that approach to work, Webex needs to hold richer context than the agents could find elsewhere, which is why Kjesbu keeps returning to the meetings, calls, messages and documents already flowing through the platform. Cisco told Gartner that AI Assistant adoption in meetings grew ninefold over the eleven months before this year's Magic Quadrant.
