Cisco and Zoom both used Goldman Sachs' Communacopia + Technology Conference, the investment bank's annual gathering of major tech and communications companies, to explain how AI is changing what their platforms are built to do. Away from the conference stage, Google fixed a cross-platform meeting problem that affects most organisations running mixed calendar systems, and Microsoft pushed out a run of Teams changes covering meeting rooms, admin controls and device authentication.
Cisco and Zoom at Communacopia
Cisco spoke on 8 September. Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, appeared alongside CFO Mark Patterson and said AI agents now account for roughly 60% of total token volume moving through the systems Cisco tracks, up fourteenfold since February. Set against that, he put serious enterprise adoption of agents at under 2% of the workforce, a gap he used to argue that Cisco's current AI-driven demand is still in its early stages rather than close to a ceiling.
I actually don't see an end in sight as far as the demand signal.
Patel said Cisco has folded more than 250 acquisitions into a single platform spanning silicon, networking, security, observability and collaboration, where products that used to be managed separately now run on one unified control plane. The company now has 32,000 engineers using AI to build its own products, he said, and expects around 70% of its portfolio to be entirely AI-written by the end of next year. Fiscal 2027 revenue guidance implies 15% growth at the midpoint, with underlying growth still in double digits before AI effects are factored in. For UC&C specifically, the relevant detail is where Webex sits in that picture: not as a standalone product, but as one layer inside a broader AI and security platform, a framing that's been building since Cisco's device and observability moves earlier this year.
Zoom CFO Michelle Chang spoke the following day and made a related but different argument. She drew a distinction between systems of engagement, where conversations happen, and systems of record, where the outcomes of those conversations get stored and acted on, and said Zoom's advantage lies in the former.
There's so much that happens in human-to-human conversations that just gets lost. It never sits in a system of record.
Chang's argument is that Zoom can capture the context of a conversation as it happens and turn it into something usable before it disappears once the call ends, rather than leaving that work to a separate system afterwards. It builds on the platform-broadening strategy Zoom has been pursuing since it moved beyond its meetings roots, most visibly through the Revenue Accelerator suite and the Common Room acquisition.
RingCentral also had a Communacopia slot, on 10 September, though details weren't public at the time of writing. Given how directly RingCentral's AI-powered customer engagement pitch overlaps with what Cisco and Zoom described, it's worth revisiting once the transcript is available.
Google Fixes Cross-Platform Calendar Joins
Google announced improvements to Google Calendar that make it easier to join meetings hosted on Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Cisco Webex when the invite comes from a different calendar system to the one the recipient uses. In practice, this covers the common situation where a Teams link lands in a Google Calendar invite, or the reverse, and the join flow either breaks or requires extra steps the user shouldn't have to take. For any organisation running a mixed calendar and meeting stack, which describes most enterprises, this kind of fix matters more day to day than most feature launches, even if it doesn't come with the same fanfare.
Microsoft's Teams Updates
Microsoft didn't have one headline announcement this week, but several smaller changes landed together. The chat panel will now open by default in gallery view on Teams Rooms running Android, so anyone in the room can see ongoing chat without having to open it manually, and admins can set that default across their device estate centrally.
More significant for IT teams longer term is the admin tooling Microsoft is building around agents. Admins will soon be able to discover and enable third-party agents for Teams directly from the admin centre, with recommendations and configuration visibility built in so IT can see what's being switched on before it reaches end users. General availability is expected in October. Separately, Microsoft is extending passwordless authentication to Teams Rooms hardware, with Entra resource accounts for Rooms, panels and phones continuing their rollout, backed by a migration wizard and progress dashboard in the Pro Management Portal for teams managing large device estates.
