It's called Dialog and promises to turn "fragmented interactions into continuous customer relationships."

Cisco is updating its Webex cloud collaboration platform to better accommodate AI agents. Perhaps the biggest bit of news here is a new toolset called Dialog, which is an "agentic harness" that directs AI to handle customer interactions.

The company says that Dialog tasks various agents with keeping the consumer happy, as they'll "keep working on the customer's behalf after a conversation ends." This means that agents under Dialog's umbrella have the ability to coordinate "across people, agents and backend systems."

The platform also allegedly speeds up the onboarding process, treating "AI agents like new teammates." This means they'll be given the opportunity to peruse existing employee handbooks, knowledge bases and operating procedures.

Cisco promises a safety-forward experience via a collaboration with a data analysis company called Splunk, but this is a new feature and you never know what issues are gonna pop up. Agentic AI is gonna agentic AI. The company does suggest that the Dialog platform "continuously refines agent performance with every interaction." However, that's kind of the promise with all AI agents. We'll have to wait and see.

As for employees, the updated Webex will let anyone in a workspace directly invite AI agents into "spaces, meetings and calls to execute complex, multi-step work" across the platform and in third-party applications. Cisco gives an example of an agent quickly pulling up statistics during a presentation and updating a PowerPoint on the fly. That could be extremely useful, assuming it works.

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