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. 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.