On this episode of Collaboration Cafe, The Collab Collective's Craig Durr meets with Espen Loberg, VP of Product Management at Cisco, in Oslo, Norway. Their conversation explores the synergy between artificial intelligence, sustainable design, and user-centric product development at Cisco’s Innovation Center.
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Craig Durr: What is your favorite coffee?
Espen Loberg: I always start my day with a double Americano.
Craig Durr: I knew he was a double Americano. That's what you did when I saw you back in Las Vegas, I think. Maria. Can he have a double Americana please? Okay, double Americano. Cheers
Espen Loberg: Cheers
Craig Durr: This is good coffee. You treat your staff well here.
Hey everybody! This is Craig Durr of The Collab Collective, and I want to welcome you to another edition of Collaboration Cafe. This is where I sit down and have a cup of coffee with a thought leader or an industry executive, and we talk about what's top of mind for them. Now, you might be asking yourself, “Craig, what are you doing in the middle of the forest talking about coffee?” Well, I went pretty far for this cup of coffee. I'm all the way here in Oslo, Norway, meeting with a very special person. And what a beautiful place to be talking about aesthetics, sustainability, and the environment.
Today, I'm joined by my good friend, Espen Loberg from Cisco. Espen is the VP of Product Management for Cisco Collaboration Devices and also the Site Lead for the Norway Innovation Center. Here, they combine engineering, product design, and customer engagement to tackle tough topics like how to build products for a future that is not only AI-enabled but also environmentally friendly. So, join me for this cup of coffee—I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Here, in Oslo, Norway.
So I think I'm gonna find Espen down this way. There it is!
Espen Loberg: Hey, Craig!
Craig Durr: Good to see you. How's it going?
Espen Loberg: It's going well. Welcome back to the Cisco Norway Innovations Center.
Craig Durr: That's right. This is your new prime joy. This is your baby.
Espen Loberg: This is really our new baby. We just refurbished this entire floor. We have 15 to 20 AI powered, beautiful spaces. I’m really looking forward to showing you.
Craig Durr: I would love to see it. Now, you're calling everything “AI-powered spaces,” and that’s so interesting because I was just talking to people downstairs—that's one of the topics I wanted to talk to you about.
Espen Loberg: Great! Sounds exciting
Craig Durr: Cisco has been doing AI work for a long time, right? You probably have a lot of learnings along the way.
Espen Loberg: We have done AI-based meetings and BTS technology in this building for more than a decade, kind of accelerating that with our Nvidia partnership over the last eight years. We've obviously made a lot of learnings. We're also passing some very interesting spaces there that we have to show you later. Look at this. How many cameras do we have in there? Can you count?
Craig Durr: I see about a dozen cameras through there. I don't know what that is.
Espen Loberg: This is one of our hologram prototypes. This can really allow you to see a spatial viewpoint. It’s also AI-based, of course, but in a somewhat different direction. We have been bringing AI-powered experiences over the years. The big inflection point was when we started to do speaker tracking with fixed lens cameras.
Craig Durr: When I think of Cisco, I think that you guys have been doing space intelligence for a long time. So one of the things I've always known you for is your audio intelligence and video intelligence. You guys are one of the first ones to come out with one of the multi camera solutions–
Espen Loberg: Not one of the first ones–the first ones.
Craig Durr: I mean, not one of the first ones. There's only one. There could only be one.
Espen Loberg: The biggest first inflection point for AI in the meeting room was fixed lens intelligent cameras. As the ones you see here. We have our beautiful cold cam that really pioneered the shift in the industry and allowed us to do smarter productions, right from meeting spaces, and allowed us to get far more insights from these spaces. We talk about these rooms as having Cisco's ears with the microphones, eyes with the cameras, and brains with the powerful Nvidia codecs.
And it's all coming together in spaces like this with our beautiful, award winning designs. Here, you also see how we take in AI-based intelligence with our microphones and our pan–tilt zoom cameras to the next level for our multi camera AI experiences. This is where we also pioneered the concept of cinematic meetings. We've now gotten to a point where we can really take that to the next level.
Craig Durr: So there's a lot of entrances into the AI-enabled spaces here right now. And you guys have been doing it for a while. How do you view the idea of separating the true AI-driven experiences from the hype? Is there a lot of hype out there?
Espen Loberg: There's a lot of hype out there. You see a lot of it from our competitors. You throw AI on everything and look at what sticks. I think the measure of whether you provide good AI or not is adoption at the end of the day, right? Is this something users, customers are adopting? I think what we try to see is if the feature or the capability doesn't provide a better user experience. If it doesn't save you time or increase productivity, and if it doesn't give you insights that you really couldn't get to before–it’s probably not a great AI feature.
Obviously, we have a lot of those great AI features. I think the most promising evolution in the meeting space is the Webex AI transcripts. I've really been ‘wowed’ at how good those are, how much value they provide, and how much more efficient you are with your post meeting processing because of it.
Craig Durr: There's a lot of hype around generative AI, and then this idea of what I call applied AI. So the audio and video experience that we're talking about, to me, is an applied AI application. How do you characterize transcripts? Is that leveraging generative, large language models?
Espen Loberg: Absolutely. It's a combination, right? But it's obviously large language models at the core making this possible. You want to feed what's coming in from the meeting into those models. And then, you need the combination of what you refer to as applied AI, our audio-video AI, plus the large language models. As we announced at Webex One last year, Cisco is pioneering the concept of Real-time Media Models.
That goes way beyond the concept of the language model. It captures everything that's going on in the room. And to do that well, you need really high quality cameras, really high quality pro microphones, and really high quality loudspeakers.
Craig Durr: So the Real-time Media Model, I've always loved that. That's the idea that audio is a very important data stream, and video is a very important data stream. There's just a lot of harvesting of that data taking place, right? But in your models, what you wind up doing is you're able to actually match that with what's taking place within the room, with who's speaking, where they're located, and matching it up to transcripts, and actually creating very powerful data.
Espen Loberg: Exactly. And providing you with insights in the future that would be hard to get to as of today. For instance, meeting sentiments–who has actually engaged or not in the meeting. Combining gaze, audio, tonal voice into these large language models.
Craig Durr: They're going to start catching me when I start falling asleep in those meetings. That's what they're gonna do. They're trying to get me here.
This is a beautiful space, and I like that you've kind of captured the eye of the customer and the imagination of the customer. This is the future, but you guys are thinking even further out. I mean, if we were to talk like five years from now, what do you think we're going to be talking about when we're talking about AI-enabled spaces?
Espen Loberg: That's a really good question. I think we touched upon it with the Real-time Media Models. I think those really allow us to explore and discover things with AI that we are currently really not thoroughly thinking about. It will evolve along the tracks we're currently seeing, but we will get some surprises and some really good insights. We've had some true ‘wow’ experiences over the last two years. And those will just be coming at an even more frequent speed. We also talk a lot about the end user and experience, but I think we're likely to see the biggest shift in the short term with what AI is doing for IT facilities and HR.
When it comes to the insights you can get from AI and how that can help, particularly in IT, users be more proactive. We see that very clearly in our latest control hub advancements, where we announced the workspace ranking feature that allows you to be more proactive as an IT professional and really become the hero because you can proactively address issues before your stakeholders experience them. And we see the same with the power of the bigger Cisco platform.
Craig Durr: We are in your experience center right now. And when you're walking customers through, I see spaces. We already saw some of the collaboration things as well. I bet you, this is one of those places and spaces where those customers give you the “Aha, I get it. I see it.” I can tell you presence in a room, and I can tell you what occupancy rates are. Yeah?
Espen Loberg: There's a lot of ‘aha’ moments in here, right? I think we do a pretty decent job of presenting this on our websites and in our collateral, but we have our project workspace. We should be really taking it to the next level now with something you will see later in the year at the next One.
You can look forward to that. But this is where you can touch and feel and see it–in an environment that's likely to be kind of similar to your own customer environment, right? So we have a lot of ‘aha’ moments. We opened this center now, just before the summer. We had a joint event with Microsoft. We got a 9.1 out of 10 rating from the customers that attended. And customers from all over the world are just flocking to this space. It's super, super exciting.
Craig Durr: And it's got nothing to do with that coffee bar that's downstairs, right?
Espen Loberg: It has something to do with that coffee bar.
Craig Durr: We should go find that coffee bar and double check that.
So I guess what I wanted to come back to is this–you've walked me through this space. It's a beautiful space. It's very thoughtful in terms of its design, in terms of its human centric experience. And I think it's a great analogy for how you and your team have approached your products. You're very thoughtful about what you're putting into that design, and one of the key topics you've been talking about lately with me is designing for sustainability, right?
Espen Loberg: Absolutely
Craig Durr: Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts as you're designing products for the future and for sustainability.
Espen Loberg: Absolutely, I’d love to do that. So sustainability is really the number one premise for our new design language that you will see in our products, starting in a couple of months, and then for the next couple of years. Everything is designed with sustainability as the number one requirement. And we've made great progress when it comes to having design and engineering come together to realize all the benefits of doing things sustainability first. And we see so many exciting advancements.
Craig Durr: So tell me your thought process here–when you're trying to balance these things. You have aesthetics, you have functionality, and then you have sustainability. That's a lot to balance when you're sitting down with a blank sheet of paper trying to figure out this product. How do you go about doing that?
Espen Loberg: It always starts with the functionality. Our devices provide the ears, the eyes, and the brains that feed into our software experiences. So what we are doing, particularly going forward, is that we want to accentuate those elements in our products that deliver or feed the software enhanced experience, right? So you will see that in our high quality cameras, you will see those being slightly more accentuated. You will see it in our microphones, how we design our microphones, how we design our loudspeakers. So that's one element where functionality is giving input to the design process. And then it's about aesthetics. You've been through all of these spaces. I mean, it looks like you're feeling calm.
Craig Durr: I am. This is the Nordic way. I mean, there is simplicity, there is functionality, there is cleanliness–a clean line in the aura I see within the design, which I really appreciate.
Espen Loberg: Yeah, and this is really what we strive for. You should feel comfortable, included in these spaces. We really want you to kind of calm down and enjoy when you're in the space with our devices. So getting to that calm aesthetic is a key objective. And then I would say, how can we minimize materials? How can we make the products as small as practically possible for the purpose they serve? Those are really kind of how we balance those considerations.
Craig Durr: Here's a funny one. There's a Norwegian word. What’s it called for “cozy?”
Espen Loberg: Koselig
Craig Durr: See, I love that word. That's a great word. So we are getting ready to go to a big event for you, which is Webex One. And without revealing any type of confidentiality, any type of things leading into that, you are already thinking ahead to those next generations of products. What are some of those key themes that are bringing together this aesthetic sense, sustainability, and still preserving that functionality that you're thinking about?
Espen Loberg: Yeah, I'm not sure if you will see it already at Webex One, but as you know, we have a design lead who has some experience from the sneaker business. In the not too distant future, I think you will see how some inspiration from that will influence our textiles. As you know, we're using textiles to provide this calming effect and aesthetics. There's a lot of very exciting things we can do. And when it comes to new ways of doing textiles, it will also make that part of our products way more sustainable. You should watch for that over the next couple of years.
Craig Durr: I will
Espen Loberg: We're very excited about what's going on. You will see products that are far smaller than similar products from our competitors, delivering a way better experience–by that, reducing packaging, transportation, etcetera. And then you've already seen me present that to you already, but you will see how we manage energy consumption in a very different way in our products. We quite recently announced and brought out a new power reduction mode on our board pros–Cisco board pro, and across our installed base. We're now saving 270 American households worth of energy.
Craig Durr: Really?
Espen Loberg: Every day just by (creating a) very thoughtful hardware-software combination that allows our customers to have the same experience, but just consuming less energy.
Craig Durr: I love you have to make the American household reference because we're such you know, over users of– Well, Espen, thank you so much for your time.
Espen Loberg: Thank you.
Craig Durr: I really appreciate this cup of coffee that you shared with me. I think we've got some really great insights of what you're thinking about in terms of sustainability, what you're thinking about in terms of AI in the meeting spaces, and what the future holds. And I'm gonna get into that NDA room. It’s the last thing I do before I leave.
Espen Loberg: Next year, next year.
Craig Durr: All right. Well, this has been a great experience, to use your word, has been very koselig. So cozy hearing this. Everyone, thank you so much. This has been another edition of the Collaboration Cafe. Take care.