On this episode of Direct from the Expo, Craig Durr interviews Rich Bayes, Senior Director and Head of Product for Cisco Collaboration Devices, live from InfoComm 2026. Their conversation explores Cisco's vision for the AI-powered workplace and how collaboration devices are evolving into intelligent infrastructure for hybrid work. Rich shares insights into Cisco's latest innovations across AI-enabled meeting experiences, collaboration hardware, cloud management, and IT operations, highlighting how the company is connecting devices, data, and AI to create smarter, more adaptive workspaces.
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Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. We are here Direct from the Expo, InfoComm 2026. This is one of my favorite events. We get to talk to executives about products and solutions coming to market, and I have a great one for you now. Rich Bayes, how are you doing?
Rich Bayes: Good, how are you?
Craig Durr: Good. Rich is the Senior Director and Head of Product for Cisco Collaboration Devices. It's a mouthful, and it's a lot to cover. Cisco as a company is very broad and diverse, but the investment you've made into the collaboration industry is fantastic. I'd like to talk to you more about that, because you guys have had some great product announcements coming out right now, right?
Rich Bayes: Yes, we have a bunch being announced at this show, actually.
Craig Durr: Now, what's really interesting is I love the approach. You've actually looked at the room as part of AI infrastructure. It's a really interesting concept. Can you explain it, so we understand?
Rich Bayes: If you think about the rooms in the workplace, they're being used all the time for different interactions. In this new world of the agentic workforce that we're coming into, there's really an agentic workplace as well. How do you enable each one of these spaces to compound the value of AI for team scenarios, the “we” aspect? These collaboration devices don't just do video, they do more than that. They're a sensor into the environment, on the network, and they power that last mile of the AI to the user. I think this is where we at Cisco are seeing how the network stack, the security stack, the platform, and the collaboration device really all come together to unlock the workplace.
Craig Durr: And you've just made some recent announcements at Cisco Live, which carry forward into here. One of those is Cloud Control, which is a great manifestation of all those coming together.
Rich Bayes: Yeah, Cloud Control is really about how we bring a single pane of glass for all Cisco applications and outcomes. While some teams might just have collaboration users, some teams are managing the entire IT stack end to end, and making them jump through different portals is time consuming, but it also breaks context.
If you look at the AI world example, you want to have contextual information of what's happening across different products at the same time. Bringing it into Cloud Control allows us to access all of what was previously siloed into a full fabric of data.
Craig Durr: I love it. Let's bring it back to the collaboration story. One of the things you've done recently is you've added the ability to install AI agentic services on the devices in the room, with some new ones just recently announced. Will you share those with me?
Rich Bayes: Yeah, over the last couple of years in particular, we've invested in how we build an agentic framework on the devices. We've unlocked, recently, Director agent, and it's a game changer. I had this stat in my head, roughly one in 100 people change the camera in a room, because a lot of people see the touch panel as not their property. We've announced eight or nine different camera modes over the last decade.
Craig Durr: But no one will use them.
Rich Bayes: The admin will set it up and configure it, but no one will use it. So having the ability for the Director agent to understand the context of the room and choose the best camera mode is a game changer, because now the far side feels like they get a much more inclusive experience of what's happening in the space. That's really what collaboration is all about. How do you break down that distance? How do you remove not just the physical distance, but also the trust distance between people, because collaboration is all based on trust. When I go back to Oslo, I want to have a video call with you, Craig, and be like, “I saw Craig in Las Vegas, and he looks the same on video.”
Craig Durr: That's good. I just want you to know, I am taller on video. Just so you understand. But that's not the only agent because Director agent is very powerful. I think it removes the intimidation factor of, I don't know how to change this. You also have some other ones. You have Notetaker agent.
Rich Bayes: Yes, and Notetaker agent is a really great one, because there are still a lot of meetings, maybe even half, that happen in a space and don't connect to a meeting platform. You always need the ability to have a video device in the room that can connect to a platform, but you might just have a local meeting.
Craig Durr: Okay
Rich Bayes: How do you make sure those local meetings can still get value? Having a Notetaker agent in the room removes the need to take the notes yourself, so you can stay fully engaged in the conversation. If you remove that need to multitask in your head, you'll be more engaged, and you can get to the outcomes faster.
Craig Durr: I love it. And that's ROI. It's actually part of a story I helped you with earlier, where presence helps drive those outcomes. We're talking about presence and the ability to engage with people, listen, understand what's being said, and participate in those conversations.
There's another one you just recently announced. Now, I know this is on the phone, but I want to talk about it, which is the translator.
Rich Bayes: Yeah, translation is a big thing in a multicultural world, and we want to bring authenticity. Our translator agent doesn't just convert voice to text and text to voice, we actually try to maintain voice-to-voice translation and make sure we continue that context because tone of voice matters. A direct translation from text doesn't always bring the rest of the communication across. The conversation we're having right now is very verbal between us, but there are nonverbal interactions, the cues you're giving the audience in response to what I'm saying, and that doesn't come across in a transcript.
Craig Durr: Right
Rich Bayes: So how do we use agents to bring that back? That's in the future, and I think that's where the real value of AI comes from.
Craig Durr: And what I love is it's available currently on the phone, but I can only imagine where we see this in video interactions as well, right?
Rich Bayes: A hundred percent. This is something we're unlocking, and that's our investment with the NVIDIA and Cisco architecture. We're future-proofing our devices to unlock these new outcomes, so the end-user value will keep multiplying. As we solve these new problems, we're going to unlock new opportunities to solve even more.
Craig Durr: Talking about the architecture, that's a great segue into a new product that was announced. We're going to talk about the Board Pro G3. This is the third generation of your all-in-one board. Talk to me about that.
Rich Bayes: Yeah, the Board Pro G3 is a great all-in-one device, coming from the lineage of the G2 and the G1 before it. Customers really love the simplicity of being able to deploy a consistent experience in every room. But one of the things we've developed a lot over the last couple of years has been Cinematic Meetings and the RoomVision camera experiences.
Normally, for that, you'd need a bar or an integrated codec, like a Room Kit Pro G2. Now, with the Board Pro G3 we can extend that value to bring those experiences in, and really future-proof the chipset to unlock outcomes in the future. We have new models for noise cancellation that can access deep learning accelerators, edge AI, all on the edge.
Craig Durr: And not only that, but this device is now capable of participating in your AV over IP ecosystem as well, which means you can start using this device the way you might use other products, with that extensibility.
Rich Bayes: Yeah, for example, if you want to put this device into a training space where you want interactivity, you might want a whiteboard session but also a presenter camera. If you're presenting to a lot of people in the space, the people on the far end don't just get a back shot of your head or a side profile. You have the ability to extend, with a single-cable architecture, to bring a RoomVision PTZ camera to the back of the room.
Craig Durr: Sure
Rich Bayes: Before, that was a bit of a challenge with the board infrastructure we had, and now with the G3 we've unlocked the ability to really bring the network fully in.
Craig Durr: And not only that, but the ceiling mic also. So now, in an extended room, you can have a front-of-room, simple-to-install device with extended audio throughout a large space.
Rich Bayes: And the benefit of the Board Pro G3 with those other products is that we don't lose that simplicity of install time. We're still talking minutes, not days or hours. Minutes to install these devices, and that's the real benefit. You can get a room up and going very fast, and you can duplicate and replicate that across many different templates and rooms. That brings a lot of consistency when you have multiple offices and regions with different tech hands at each location. The Board Pro G3 gives you a confidence level, you know what these rooms are capable of doing and how they're deployed, because it comes in this all-in-one package.
Craig Durr: You've also done some great work breaking down another barrier within the video ecosystem, and that's different platforms. You're talking about the power of the devices and the Cisco intelligence, and you've been working hard to expand that ecosystem with native experiences on it.
Rich Bayes: Yeah, we announced here at the show, actually this morning, Zoom Rooms for Cisco devices.
Craig Durr: Congratulations!
Rich Bayes: It's an extension of our partnership with Zoom. Last year we announced that we could run Zoom Meetings within the Cisco Rooms experience mode, which was a game changer, because we then had the ability to bring another full-featured meeting application in. But there are certain customers who are very accustomed to the Zoom home screen, a Zoom-centric model. They love the value of Cisco hardware, but they needed to make sure that experience wasn't breaking when they brought Cisco hardware in.
Craig Durr: So I want to make sure I understand this. With that workflow, you now have two offerings. I can be within the native Webex UI, have a Zoom meeting come up on my calendar, launch it, and it goes into the Zoom native experience. But now what you're adding is the device can start in that Zoom native mode.
Rich Bayes: Just like Microsoft Teams Rooms mode. We now have the ability, beta in June and GA targeted for September, to deploy the device into a Zoom Rooms mode and get that full experience.
Craig Durr: And all this Cisco intelligence that's on the device, is it still available?
Rich Bayes: All the intelligence you get, like Workspace Advisor and all the features we have there, you still get that. I think the value of Cisco is that we compound on top of these platform applications. The RoomOS architecture is built around making the space the best space possible, and then running any application on top of that to take advantage of all of it. So you don't lose ThousandEyes support, you can understand the network path and all of that. That's still valid for every meeting profile.
Craig Durr: It is fantastic. It's the strength of the Cisco powerhouse, of its portfolio. Now, we're talking a lot about AI on the endpoint, but you have not left out AI and how it works for those IT administrators, right? You have some great products here. One of my favorites is Workspace Advisor. Would you share with the audience what Workspace Advisor is?
Rich Bayes: Workspace Advisor is really about creating a digital twin of your room. The best way to think about it is that you design your room, maybe in our Workspace Designer tool or your own tool, then you install it, and after that you're left hoping it's still the same room you installed two years ago. What Workspace Advisor does is take the camera, understand the space, and make sure this room is still the same. Did the furniture change? Did the lighting change? Because drift takes place.
Craig Durr: It does
Rich Bayes: Exactly. So how do you check that the experience you signed off on is still the same at day two, day 365, day 700? It should be the same experience you installed and expect.
Craig Durr: So then you have a window where you can actually adjust the room, or even adjust how the technology adapts to the new layout of the room.
Rich Bayes: Correct, and what we're doing now is starting to understand how people use the space over time. There are so many data points. Across the whole Cisco architecture there are millions of data points we're touching, but they're living in silos at the moment, and you need to contextually bring them together. Advisor is able to understand, for example, that this room has had less presence the last seven days, fewer people using it. Is that because there's an issue in the room popping up, or because there are other rooms nearby that have issues? We can understand the whole workplace value, and that's where Cisco's differentiation comes from. We're not looking at each individual room as a solo room, we're looking at how the whole workplace comes together.
Craig Durr: Now, there are other things that play into some recent announcements: Agentic Ops.
Rich Bayes: Yes, Agentic Ops is a huge moment for our industry, and something I'm very passionate about. You shouldn't force people into different workflows from where they currently are. How do we bring the technology to them, to save the admin work for end users? How do we make sure the camera modes change correctly? For admins, you might be working in Microsoft Teams on a daily basis and using Copilot. How do you get the value of Control Hub, which is the data platform underneath, and bring that to the Copilot interface?
That's where Agentic Ops comes in, and we can start leveraging these experiences. But I want to say something here. Most people think, “Sure, I'll just attach an LLM to Control Hub and it just works.” You need to build skill and an understanding of the context of the structured data set. So what Cisco has done is build this skill around our MCP, Model Context Protocol, integration, that basically allows you to say, “Compare these two rooms together, and we'll go and understand what to really compare.” You can talk in natural language to it, and we'll do all the hard work underneath to figure out how to compare the right data set and give you something back that the LLM can then go deeper on.
Craig Durr: So this allows, for example, if I'm working in Copilot, I can leverage my knowledge and experience within Copilot to inquire about the room, about information whose data is available through Control Hub.
Rich Bayes: Yes. The advantage now, with our partnership with Microsoft, is that we've expanded beyond just Microsoft Teams Rooms to look at how we leverage Copilot and other Teams workflows because that data is super critical there, and it's not there today. But it goes beyond Copilot; it's literally any AI interface you use. If your team is using OpenAI or another tool that can support MCP, you can bring this in and reference it with other data. That's a real game changer in how to analyze your workplace.
Craig Durr: You guys are having a feature-packed show is the best way I can describe it.
Rich Bayes: Yeah, I always feel when we come to shows, “Oh, we don't have a lot on the truck,” and then we get here and we're like, there's a lot on the truck. And there's a lot more brewing behind the scenes as well, so I'm excited about the future roadmap. We have a lot of innovation around the workplace coming. What's here is a bit of a sneak peek into where we're going next.
Craig Durr: I love it, and I love that it's apparent you've been building out a platform, both for the endpoints and for the IT administrator, that ties into the larger Cisco ecosystem story. This has been a great update. If our audience wants to find out more about some of the things we talked about, where should they go?
Rich Bayes: Yeah, you can contact a Cisco representative, but go to designer.cisco.com, we'll put the link there, and that gets you to our Workspace Designer, where you can design rooms. You can contact your sales team, that's probably the best way to engage, or also reach out to one of your partners who work with us, and we can get you engaged.
Craig Durr: Perfect. I love it, Rich. This has been a great update. I appreciate your time.
Rich Bayes: Thank you, Craig.
Craig Durr: Thank you. Hey everyone, Craig Durr at InfoComm 2026, Direct from the Expo update. Stay tuned for some more exciting updates later. Take care.