Cisco and Microsoft deepen partnership for meetings, AI
Cisco and Microsoft have taken the next interoperability step by natively integrating Teams with Cisco devices. Explore the collaboration announcements from WebexOne.
When home improvement retailer Lowe's built its 25-story tech lab in Charlotte, N.C., lead AV infrastructure engineer Brady Freese realized how complicated it had become to install and manage meeting rooms.
Company leadership approached Freese to determine how to streamline the meeting rooms and improve meeting experiences across the business. Freese spoke at Cisco's WebexOne partner and customer conference on the strategy to simplify meeting rooms by deploying Cisco devices.
Lowe's was able to downsize to two main meeting devices: a touch panel on the table and a Room Bar Pro on the wall, he said. Lowe's is also a Microsoft customer, with several meeting rooms that include Surface Hub digital whiteboards.
By consolidating devices, Lowe's improved the meeting experience for employees and streamlined the installation of meeting rooms, Freese said.
The more complicated rooms required high-level expertise for the back-end work and programming for the installation. However, with a simplified hardware deployment, combined with the Webex Control Hub management portal on the back end, field service teams can quickly set up meeting rooms, he said.
"We've gone from installing a room in about a week or so to deploying three to four rooms a day," Freese said.
Cisco deepens deals with Microsoft, Zoom
Cisco aims to simplify meeting room deployments even further, following its announcement at WebexOne that Cisco devices will natively integrate with Microsoft Teams Rooms. The Webex Control Hub, an administrative dashboard, can also manage Teams Rooms, said Alan McCann, director of software engineering at Cisco.
If you have different collaboration products, they should actually integrate with each other.
Jeetu PatelPresident and Chief Product Officer, Cisco
Cisco and Microsoft are deepening their partnership by integrating the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP) with Cisco devices running RoomOS 26. MDEP is an Android-based framework for hardware partners building Teams-certified devices. Cisco customers will benefit from MDEP security and feature updates, in addition to Cisco's security and remote management capabilities, McCann said.
Cisco announced a similar partnership with Zoom, in which Zoom created an app for Cisco RoomOS to enable native Zoom meetings on Cisco devices.
The days of walled gardens, where vendors would create completely closed systems, are over, said Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco.
"If you have different collaboration products, they should actually integrate with each other," Patel said. It's the responsibility of vendors to support an open ecosystem to protect their customers' investments, he said.
Advancing agentic AI capabilities
Cisco also revealed a bidirectional integration between Cisco AI Assistant and Microsoft Copilot, enabling the two AI tools to communicate with each other.
If a user is working on a PowerPoint or Word document and needs information from a Webex meeting recording, Copilot can access that information through the Webex AI. Because the integration is bidirectional, the AI agent in the Webex app can access Microsoft applications, such as Outlook and SharePoint, through Microsoft Graph.
Webex will feature new agentic AI capabilities that Patel dubbed "agentic teammates." The new AI capabilities, expected to be released in early 2026, include the following:
Notetaker. Records in-person meetings on a laptop, mobile or room deviceand provides summaries, action items and insights from in-room conversations.
Polling agent. Follows the meeting conversation and suggests polls to engage participants and gather input, then creates poll questions in Slido.
Task agent. Acts on the user's behalf based on meeting action items, such as updating a ticket in a ticketing system or creating leads in a CRM platform.
Meeting scheduler. Schedules follow-up meetings by determining who should attend and coordinating calendars and times.
Receptionist. Automates routine queries, transfers calls, schedules appointments and answers customer questions using the contact center-based Webex AI Agent.
"We're in the second phase of AI where agents are going to conduct tasks and jobs almost fully autonomously on behalf of humans," Patel said.
