Cisco on AI: The 'Future of Collaboration'Cisco on AI: The 'Future of Collaboration'

For a company set on "moving at warp speed," Cisco's most recent acquisition target, artificial intelligence startup MindMeld, fits in with the geeky futuristic theme the organization has been championing as of late. With AI making enterprise inroads at a rapid clip, across all industries and all kinds of products, Cisco sees investment in this space as an imperative for the success of its Collaboration business unit.

The MindMeld acquisition aligns with Cisco's mission to get its products into more hands, faster, which is the message Jens Meggers, Cisco's SVP and GM for the Cloud Collaboration Technology Group, drove home in a recent interview about the company's future vision for collaboration.

Smarter Collaboration
The acquisition sees Cisco paying $125 million to bring the MindMeld technology -- an AI platform for building "human-like" conversational interfaces for voice, messaging, and video in applications and devices -- and the very real human talent behind the platform, under its umbrella.

Cisco will largely leverage the technology to advance Spark, Cisco's team collaboration platform, specifically in the area of ambient listening, as UC analyst Zeus Kerravala told us in his recent No Jitter post on the acquisition. It's easy to conceptualize how AI in the workplace can make workers smarter and more efficient, as Kerravala wrote, calling out an example where a user could ask Spark to summarize Spark messages and identify items that require immediate attention. "If you're of the belief that the amount of data in the workplace will continue to grow exponentially -- and who doesn't believe this? -- an AI capability accessed through speech and messages must drive the future of work," he wrote.

Meggers would surely agree with Kerravala's comment. In our discussion of Cisco's collaboration vision, Meggers confirmed that AI is a necessary component. "We will see, in the next two to five years, collaboration products becoming more intelligent," he said. "It's an unstoppable trend."

But an intelligent conversational interface has value elsewhere, of course, including a "huge" amount in the contact center space, Meggers said. To accommodate specific vertical and company use cases in the customer care world, however, Cisco is going to have to deliver up specific domain knowledge, industry watcher Sheila McGee-Smith shared with me based on a briefing with Cisco's Keith Griffin, a member of Meggers' Collaboration CTO team, held with contact center analysts. For example, answering a question like "What is the weight of that handbag?" will require access to specific product databases. This would open opportunities for professional services for Cisco and channel partners, she added.

Driving the Future of Work
The MindMeld acquisition is not Cisco's first foray into AI as it looks for ways to boost intelligence in the collaboration environment. "Over the past year and a half, we've been working on basically anything we can do to enhance our collaboration portfolio," Meggers said. Last summer Cisco partnered with IBM to integrate Watson with its enterprise collaboration solutions to create a more intelligent experience in the Spark cloud, and, separately, previewed Project Monica, a team-oriented, collaboration-focused virtual assistant prototype.

If you were at Enterprise Connect Orlando in March, you saw Meggers showcase the new and improved Monica, now called "Hey Spark," in his keynote. On stage, Meggers asked Hey Spark to tell him when his next meeting was, and the digital assistant responded, telling him he was seven minutes late before immediately connecting him to the conference call. Once on the call, facial recognition software -- one of three different types of machine learning Cisco has already baked into its video meeting products -- identified each of the meeting participants by name, as shown in the below screen grab.

"We knew AI would be coming to collaboration sooner or later," Meggers said, "but this is a new expertise area -- we had some of this expertise already, but not enough," he said regarding Cisco's decision to acquire an AI technology company. Cisco wanted to work more with conversational interfaces, he noted, adding that what MindMeld is doing in this area is, well, "incredible."

The MindMeld acquisition represents a doubling -- or "tripling" -- down on AI investments for Cisco, Meggers said. "Just having AI technology is not going to be a super power. You need to configure it properly to get really good results. Once the acquisition closes [at the end of July], we'll be able to really dig into the MindMeld technology and look for ways that it can augment the AI capabilities we already have in Spark," with one goal being to use MindMeld and Watson to complement each other.

Cisco will get the help of roughly 25 MindMeld employees coming on board to join Meggers and his new Cognitive Collaboration team. While Meggers would not say how many people would ultimately make up that team, he did say more than 3,000 people work under him in the larger Collaboration business group.

Next Page: Meggers on the future of AI and Cisco's AI investmentAn Incremental Approach
As "unstoppable" a trend as AI may be, don't expect to see everything happen at once -- even given Cisco's ambitions to move as fast as the Starship Enterprise does at warp speed. But in the months following the close of the acquisition, do look for Cisco to start incorporating AI technology in products like the Spark bot, for example, in simple ways. "More and more dots will be connected over time, and in the 12- to 18-month time frame, you'll start to see things becoming really quite good," Meggers promised.

The goal, he added, is to "make every interaction better with intelligence."

This sentiment echoes what Meggers said on stage at Enterprise Connect. During his keynote presentation, Meggers used the evolution of transportable music players over the years as an example of how experience progresses over time.

The music-listening experience progression began with the boom box, evolved to a cassette player, then Walkman, then iPod, until finally today we are at a point where music files are streamed from the cloud to our personal smart devices. AI's progression in the enterprise will follow a similar path, Meggers said. "AI in collaboration is the next big thing. It's going to completely change how we do work. But that change will come slowly, you will not notice it; it will be incremental."

Investing in Cognitive Collaboration
While Meggers wasn't able to share how much of Cisco's R&D spend is earmarked for the Cognitive Collaboration group, he pointed to the $125 million spend on MindMeld as evidence of the company's commitment to AI development.

"AI is such a big deal in this industry -- and every industry -- that if you don't invest it in that would be a big mistake," Meggers said. "It would be like not installing an email client in '95, or not putting in a connection to the Internet in '92." Failing to invest organically in cognitive collaboration, in fact, could have meant Cisco would have "missed the boat" on delivering next-generation customer experiences.

Cisco may now have a stronger AI position with MindMeld, but the effort won't stop there. Moving forward, Cisco will continue to partner on AI, and may look to additional acquisitions, as well, Meggers said. "We always have three to five targets in our back pocket." No doubt, future acquisitions and partnerships will have a tie-in to Cisco's vision for AI.

At the end of the day, Cisco is looking to make teams more efficient and successful and drive shareholder value for enterprises, Meggers said. "It's what we're striving for, and we're bringing everything together with AI."

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