On the keynote stage at WebexOne 2026 in Austin, a traveller who had missed a flight through a medical emergency asked an airline’s AI agent for a refund its policy didn't allow. The agent found the exception process, then argued the case with a human escalation specialist, citing the traveller's status and lifetime value. None of that needed the customer, whose conversation with the airline had already ended.
Cisco wants agents doing that kind of work across its portfolio, from a rebuilt Webex App to the contact centre and its room devices. Snorre Kjesbu, SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration, says one idea 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 after Collaboration posted its best quarter in seven years in August, growing 12% year on year with video devices up 40%, and after an eighth straight year as a Leader in Gartner's UCaaS Magic Quadrant.
Claude Managed Agents Join Webex Spaces, Meetings and Calls
Claude, powered by Claude Managed Agents, will be able to join Webex spaces, meetings and calls, pick up the context of a conversation and carry the follow-up work forward, while OpenAI's dots arrives through an MCP integration. Amit Barave, VP and GM of Webex Suite and AI at Cisco, says buyers should now judge a collaboration platform on how it handles that work.
“It's about how you accomplish the flow of work with agents in the loop, humans in the lead, models in the loop.”
Barave says agents will run multi-step jobs for hours or days, overnight if needed, such as compiling a monthly business review. That independence makes them less predictable than conventional software, and he says IT teams need a different approach to control.
“You don't manage them, you govern them.”
Cisco is backing that with AI Agent 360, Pindrop deepfake detection in Webex Meetings and Calling, and Webex Compliance Hub with Theta Lake. Microsoft has taken a different route, with Gartner again flagging Copilot as a potentially expensive add-on outside standard UCaaS licensing.
Dialog Takes Webex Contact Center From Conversations to Relationships
The airline demo ran on Dialog, an agentic harness for Webex AI Agent that keeps a persistent picture of each customer across channels and stays on an issue until it is resolved. Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex Customer Experience, says the first wave of AI agents was built to answer a question and close a query.
“Now we are taking a step function up, which is managing relationships: thousands of conversations, hundreds of journeys, but one relationship.”
Calling supplies much of that context, with Cisco powering communications for more than 82 million users across Webex Calling, Unified Communications Manager and BroadWorks.
GetixHealth, which handles revenue cycle work for hospital chains and provider groups, moved to Webex Contact Center two years ago after its previous platform fell behind. Dan Womack, its VP of Software, says Cisco's roadmap decided it.
