At last week’s Cisco Live EMEA in Amsterdam, Cisco delivered one of its most significant wave of collaboration innovation in recent years. While much of the event spotlighted AI-ready networking and datacentre architecture, the collaboration portfolio saw equally transformative updates, particularly for Webex Calling, intelligent workspaces, and next generation user experiences.
For us, the event was a priceless opportunity not only to see cutting-edge demos, but also to learn, test, query and network with the thousands of Cisco staff, partners and customers in attendance.
What stood out wasn’t just what Cisco showed, but how its collaboration strategy is now fully centred on AI-powered, hybrid-first experiences with a clear focus on European data, sovereignty, and governance requirements.
Cisco’s bold ambition is to position itself as THE critical infrastructure company for the AI era – with very real implications for how we design collaboration architectures over the next 3-5 years.
Here are the highlights through a Damovo lens.
Connected Intelligence
Cisco’s collaboration theme for the week was “Connected Intelligence”, building an infrastructure that supports people-to-people, people-to-AI, and AI-to-AI collaboration. This theme shaped every announcement across devices, calling, meetings, and the emerging agentic operations model.
In practical terms, this is a shift from standalone “AI assistants” towards a fabric of interoperable agents that can observe, decide, and act across your collaboration and customer experience stack.
New AI-Ready Collaboration Devices
Cisco introduced a suite of AI-ready collaboration devices like the Room Kit Pro G2 and the Desk Pro G2, both engineered to bring high fidelity audio, multi camera setups, and edge-based AI processing into meeting rooms and personal workspaces. A new AI-ready wireless phone for frontline workers, Wi-Fi Phone 9821 was announced with the ability to generate AI-powered notes, actions & summaries from calls.
Importantly these devices maintain interoperability with Webex, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet. A recurring theme in the keynote was Cisco’s cultural shift to a neutral, open ecosystem stance – welcome news for organisations managing multi-vendor estates.
AI-Powered Calling Enhancements (Webex Calling)
The most transformative announcements came from the Webex Calling platform:
“Translator Agent” – Breaking down language barriers
One of the most compelling demos on the show floor was Translator Agent, delivering real-time, speech-to-speech translation across Webex audio experiences, all while preserving tone and emotion. And it works. In multilingual markets and distributed teams, this has huge implications for customer service, support centres, and cross-border operations.
“Ask AI Assistant” for Calling & Meetings – Context at Your Fingertips
An AI layer that pulls contextual insights from past calls, meetings, and integrated enterprise apps (Salesforce, Jira, Glean etc.) elevating Webex from a communications app to a knowledge hub. For leaders trying to reduce “time to context” before customer or internal meetings, this has clear productivity value, but it will also require thoughtful data governance, especially in regulated environments.
AI Receptionist for Webex Calling
An always-on AI receptionist using national language processing to engage callers. It is multi-lingual, with intelligent routing and automation capabilities. Demos suggest it will be easy to deploy and use.
AI Assistant and Microsoft Copilot connector integration – True Interoperability
This is bi-directional integration between the AI Assistant in Webex and Microsoft Copilot. Webex content like meeting recordings, call transcripts, and message threads, will become searchable in Microsoft Copilot, while Microsoft content like SharePoint documents, OneDrive files, Teams conversations, will be accessible in the AI Assistant. This is exactly the kind of cross-platform integration many customers have been asking for.
A Strong Focus on European Compliance & Sovereignty
It was refreshing to see Cisco address the very real European concerns on data residency, sovereignty, and regulatory alignment throughout all the collaboration presentations. There was a clear commitment to ensuring these new AI capabilities meet the region’s expectations for privacy and governance.
Announcements included:
Allowing Air-gapped organisations to Access AI: Cisco AI PODs bring AI to the Cisco Meeting Server (CMS), delivering transcription, summarisation, and intelligent assistance to your most sensitive environments. This offers a path to AI-enhanced collaboration without relinquishing control of infrastructure or data.
Webex Calling Hybrid: A calling option allowing organisations to keep their existing UCM footprint while consuming cloud innovations at their own pace. Organisations can keep call control on-premise while accessing cloud innovations like AI Receptionist, intelligent routing, real-time analytics. Sovereignty without sacrificing agility.
All of this is underpinned with Security as the foundation for trust: Enhanced end-to-end encryption, Deepfake detection with Pindrop and quantum-safe cryptography. Practically, this means better protection against emerging voice fraud threats today, and a more resilient cryptographic posture as quantum capabilities evolve tomorrow.
So, what does this mean for Damovo customers?
Across the week, three themes kept surfacing in conversations with partners, customers and Cisco engineering teams:
- AI with guardrails: Features like Translator Agent and AI routing are being engineered with clear controls around data location, access, and observability, which is critical for regulated sectors in Europe. Successful adoption must be paired with robust governance.
- Hybrid as a long-term reality: Webex Calling Hybrid and continued UCM innovation acknowledge that “all-in cloud by 2027” is not realistic for many large enterprises. But Cisco are committed to providing AI tools on-premise to let customers modernise at their own pace without fragmenting operations.
- The world is moving from the chatbot era to the age of agents. AgenticOps, where agents talk to, and monitor, other agents is fast approaching, and we need to start thinking of them as embedded co-workers rather than just productivity tools.
To wrap up my takeaway from Cisco Live EMEA 2026 is that the collaboration conversation has finally matured to “how do we orchestrate intelligent, sovereign, human centric experiences across calling, meetings, and contact centre?”. Over the coming months, we’ll be working with customers to translate these announcements into concrete roadmaps, reference architectures, and pilots that prove value quickly while laying the groundwork for a sustainable AI-era collaboration strategy.
The innovations revealed at Cisco Live EMEA reaffirm the direction of the market, and we’re excited to help our customers navigate this next chapter of intelligent collaboration. If you’d like to explore how these developments map to your existing Cisco or multi‑vendor collaboration environment, the Damovo team would be delighted to continue the conversation.