On this episode of Direct from the Expo, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr talks with Amit Barave, VP and General Manager of Webex Suite at Cisco, at WebexOne 2026 in Austin, Texas. Their conversation explores how Webex is evolving beyond traditional unified communications toward agentic collaboration, where AI connects conversations, shared context, and workflows to help people accomplish more. Amit discusses Webex’s evolving user interface, purpose-built AI agents, and its approach to enterprise AI governance, security, and interoperability.
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Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and I want to welcome you to this really special edition of Direct from the Expo. We are at WebexOne 2026 in Austin, Texas. I love this event. It's my hometown. I get to welcome friends here, like Amit.
Amit Barave, how are you doing?
Amit Barave: I'm doing good. Do we want to spend some time on pronouncing my last name?
Craig Durr: We got it right that time?
Amit is the VP and General Manager of Webex Suite for Cisco.
Hey, this is your show. You and your colleagues are introducing some fantastic events. The audience has been electric out there. This is incredible.
Amit Barave: It is. It is incredible, and there's so much that is happening around us. Everyone talks about AI, so I will not keep talking about that. But the change is real.
Craig Durr: Well, let's talk about this. I want to talk to you about work. You know, because this is a conversation we're having back in the green room. In the past, unified communications has been around these very boxed ideas, meetings, messages, and calling. But work is changing. How is unified communications changing to keep up with that?
Amit Barave: Unified communications, I think we should start referring to it as unified or connected intelligence, or unified context, because it was the focus used to be on making these point-in-time interactions happen, right? That problem was solved. It's really about can you piece those together? Can you leverage AI to piece those together and drive work forward or get a lot done just through agents. That's where the work is going. So agentic collaboration is a real thing now.
Craig Durr: Now, your keynote, you had this great idea, talked about connecting the dots. So what you're talking about is filling those gaps between that meeting moment, between that calling moment, and this is where AI can be leveraged, right?
Amit Barave: Yes, and connecting the dots is pun intended and no pun intended, but you see dots and you see all these personal agents coming together. All of those technologies do have a huge potential in how we work, and that is where we are taking the collaboration. The moment I said a harness for agentic collaboration, it is about all of these interactions, all of these agents people are building. How do we give them a place where the context is shared? They can make decisions, act, and humans and agents can have a nifty flow. What's approved, what's not, and and it's not on autopilot just yet. But how quickly and how carefully we can go there is what we're enabling.
Craig Durr: Well, you have some great announcements you're bringing here, so I'd like to talk to you about those because I think these are the path forward to this future you're talking about. The first one is Webex in itself. It has a brand new user interface. I love that interface that I saw. What was the drive behind what we saw on stage?
Amit Barave: Thanks for that callout because so much has been about how agents and people work together, and that necessitates that we think about user experience differently. It's not a task-oriented point in time. It's the flow of work, and it's people and agents interjecting.
You have access or talk to your work AI at all times, right? So when you see people getting an interface where they're just discussing, the AI is showing what your workday looks like today, giving you the prep proactively, giving you nudges proactively, and you having the ability to go tap into an agent that you have, or check for progress in a workspace where you, a few others, and a few other agents are getting something done. That's what the user interface has to facilitate. But as Cisco and as Webex, the one thing that we recognize is you have to be able to trust and govern this AI, or it's not going to cut it in the enterprise.
Craig Durr: Okay
Amit Barave: So that has to be very much an integral part of the platform and also of the user interface, and that's what we've paid attention to as we are evolving the Webex UX.
Craig Durr: I love that you're explaining these use cases because it's not just a chatbot experience. I'm not just sitting there waiting for it to respond to what I'm talking about. There was proactive work being done on my behalf as we were looking. You had some great examples there.
Amit Barave: You could explicitly ask AI to have something, create a presentation based on this transcript I have or the summary of the last four conversations, but that is still a relatively quick turnaround.
When you think about where the reasoning engines and long-running agents are going, where they can actually conduct research on deep topics on behalf of you, suss out information across multiple different projects that you might not have the wherewithal to go into. So you can set it to work, come back the next morning, and you actually see a well-synthesized output where you and other folks in that channel, in that meeting, you could pick up and collaborate from there. These are the kind of things that are going to be possible.
The one other thing, this example I think is easier to imagine for people. One example I did in one of the other sessions is how agents can take over workflows that were heavily text oriented. The example I used was feedback. Collecting feedback on your employees and 360 feedback. It's usually five, six people doing that. You send a bunch of messages, and then you quickly say, "Can we talk live?” We can just cut short and go talk live, and the agents could be calling, having a conversation, collecting feedback, and you just get the synthesized output together. These are the sort of things that are going to be possible.
Craig Durr: If there was one theme I noticed, it was that it knew your work. This AI knew how you worked and was helping you with these proactive steps. It was a really powerful statement. Now, there's some other announcements that you had as well, and I wanted to check back in on this whole category, which is tasks or purpose-built AI agents that you had. So last year at WebexOne, you announced a host of several agents. How are those agents doing right now?
Amit Barave: That’s Translator and AI Receptionist. AI Receptionist is showing a really, really fast uptick, and I can even talk about the vertical. All of the customers in the retail vertical who have a ton of branch offices and locations, they're showing a strong adoption with AI Receptionist, and you can see how it simplifies their workflow.
Translator agent, the speech-to-speech translation from an unexpected vertical, if you will, the public sector and public services agencies. We were surprised to learn that, but the amount of spend they have on translation—human translators or translation services, and not only is it expensive but it's also quite a source of fatigue for people who have to do it at all times. And when you see that it can be done with comparable quality with just an agent that's in controlled availability, the customers who are using it are really excited about it.
Craig Durr: These are some great ones. And you also announced Notetaker.
Amit Barave: That's shaping up really well.
Craig Durr: Is it?
Amit Barave: Yeah, like this conversation, we would just have our phone here, and it'll capture the notes. It'll send us a summary. You can go build a video from it if you wanted to.
Craig Durr: Would it help me with your pronunciation of your last name next time?
Amit Barave: I'm gonna teach it.
Craig Durr: In addition to checking in on these existing agents that you had, you also announced a couple of new agents. There's two that really caught my eye. I want to talk about the first one, which is the Personal Assistant for Webex Calling. This is a really rich area of data of insights that I don't think people are really realizing what they can harvest from this information. Talk to me about that.
Amit Barave: You're spot on about that. On the one hand, you could look at it as, yeah, this is my personal AI receptionist, if you will. But what's different about that is the context engine that we talked about. Understanding what your work is about, sussing from all your messages, meetings, data that you have, and then understanding what you're looking to do. So it can answer calls on your behalf, and it can even get things done on your behalf. And the moment we talk about AI messages and meetings is obvious to everyone, right? But the amount of intelligence or signal there is in phone calls, in so many different verticals, that is untapped is significant right? And this Personal Agent for Calling is going to tap into that in a big way.
Craig Durr: It's one of those multipliers in terms of productivity, in terms of efficiency, it seems like an incredible tool for individuals in their workday, right?
Amit Barave: Sure is
Craig Durr: Another one that you also announced is AI Coach. Now you announced this with VidCast, right?
Amit Barave: Yes
Craig Durr: Tell me about this.
Amit Barave: Vidcast is our video messaging, and this is where some great use cases about how leaders are using it for employee engagement. Sometimes it is about broad-based messaging, or you're just sharing demos and things. But that's also an opportunity to work on your presentation skills. So our agent is watching those videos right after it's giving you some handy clues about what you could have done differently about your intonation, the use of filler words and those sorts of things, right? And you can pick that up quickly, re-record or edit. The reason I'm excited about this is because this capability is in the platform, which means you can imagine this showing up in our meetings and video calls, to the point of you potentially getting just-in-time nudges in a live meeting.
Craig Durr: That is a fantastic thing. I mean, for people such as yourself, myself, who are always in these calls presenting, what a better way to actually make us more effective in terms of getting that message across, right?
Amit Barave: Yep.
Craig Durr: I love it. So Webex is making a lot of investment in these AI tools, personal agents, and AI within the workflow of Webex, but there is one interesting challenge I have here, and I wonder how you're addressing this. Enterprises may have a multi-vendor AI strategy; they may have already made investments in other AI models or tools. How do you talk to them, or how do you make them work within this Webex solution as well?
Amit Barave: That's a great question, and if I may, I I will actually paraphrase your thesis a bit. I think we are already past having a multi-vendor AI strategy. It's already a reality because there isn't just one AI or one AI vendor that's doing everything for you that you need in your enterprise. So you may not be using all of them, but as an enterprise, you are going to be dealing with multiple ones. So, a partnerships and ecosystem-based approach is really critical to leverage or maximize the potential of AI in your enterprise.
And as Cisco, as with Webex, interoperability, open standards has been our DNA, and we are carrying that forward. So even when I talked about agents showing up in Webex, it's not just agents that Webex builds. We are allowing users to create their own through our Agent Studio, and bring agents that other vendors or others have built. And the most notable example is that we announced our partnership with Anthropic, so Claude-powered agents can now show up in Webex. And they could be giving Webex users a huge boost in terms of doing these multiplayer, multitask, or multi-step tasks within their spaces, or meetings, or through their calls.
Craig Durr: So as soon as you start talking about Anthropic and other external partners, there's a logical question: Can I trust it? Can I govern it? How do I manage it? What is your answer to that?
Amit Barave: That one is a fairly complex topic for discussion. I think, Craig, it would almost merit a half an hour conversation unto itself. And I say that because this is emerging so rapidly that right now all we can do is make sure that you're not making certain compromises from the ground up. We talk about it as one platform. We have this thing called AI Agent 360, and we bring the Cisco security observability, and red teaming, blue teaming, and the entire Trust platform you need about AI governance. That is the underpinning of all of the agents that we build and we run.
Now, when we integrate with others, we have to make sure that we can do that while honoring the observability we need, the traceability we need. Anthropic, for example, has a similar philosophy around trust and the enterprise. So it's something we're really looking forward to in terms of where we can take this, but it is a foundational consideration.
Craig Durr: I love it. So you're addressing the enterprise concerns around trust governance, the end users' concerns around workflow continuity, the ability to enable them with new personal agents and other agents within their workflow. You have a lot of great, powerful stories coming out here in this event.
Amit Barave: We just want to make it real. These ideas, like you're saying, have resonated with folks, and thank you for acknowledging that as well. But the proof is in the pudding. So we're heads down, and I'm really excited about where this is going to be in 3, 4, 5 months from now.
Craig Durr: Well, I'd love to hear about that. But for the audience today, the audience that's listening in, where can they go to learn more? If they're here at Webex, what should they do? And if they're not, what should they do?
Amit Barave: Over here, check out the booth. All of these things are in live demos there. Please go check those out, and then stay tuned at Webex.com.
Craig Durr: Fantastic! Well, Amit, thank you so much for this update. This has been fantastic. The energy you had on stage, you brought here to the room. I appreciate that so much.
Amit Barave: Thank you, Craig. Always a pleasure.
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst with the Collab Collective, coming to you live from WebexOne 2026. Stay tuned for some more updates.