Cisco is opening its Webex collaboration platform to AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI and giving users personal agents that can answer calls on their behalf, SiliconANGLE reported Wednesday. The company announced the features at its WebexOne event in Austin, Texas, alongside a new platform for customer-facing agents and expanded tools for monitoring them.

What Happened

Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents will be built into Webex to analyze information, generate content and carry out coordinated actions. Cisco is also using Model Context Protocol, the open standard for connecting AI models to outside data, to make Webex data available to OpenAI's Dots agents, and it plans to offer Dots inside Webex as personal agents.

Webex's own personal agents will be able to pick up a call when the user is unavailable, assess how urgent the caller's request is and then schedule a follow-up or send a message. Cisco is also adding an AI coach to its Vidcast video recorder that gives feedback on a presenter's pacing, tone and wordiness.

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For customer service, a new platform called Dialog links a customer's history with enterprise systems and knowledge bases so agents can carry out long-running tasks that involve employees, other agents and back-end systems, while keeping context as a conversation moves between channels. Cisco plans a beta in the first quarter of 2027.

RoomOS 27, the operating system for Cisco's meeting-room devices, is due in November with added AI features and native support for Google Meet. It includes a Director agent that coordinates cameras, microphones and speakers and uses Nvidia acceleration to remove background noise.

Why It Matters

Cisco's management layer for agents, AI Agent 360, is gaining observability built on Splunk that ties agent behavior to operational data, with general availability planned for December. Cisco AI Defense supplies the security controls. The pitch is that a company running agents from several vendors inside Webex needs one place to see what those agents are doing.

Cisco is also addressing customers that cannot send data to public clouds. Its on-premises Contact Center Express product gets voice support this month, and a layer for hosting third-party AI models on premises is expected in early 2027.

Snorre Kjesbu, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager of collaboration, said agents are joining the workforce at an unprecedented pace. Vinod Muthukrishnan, who leads Webex customer experience operations, described a shift away from building agents toward training and onboarding them like digital co-workers.

Context

The OpenAI tie-in comes about a week after OpenAI introduced Dots on Sept. 29 as persistent ChatGPT agents that keep working on user-set goals in the background. At the same event, Cisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel argued that the agent market will be decided on context, cost and control, and said agent token consumption overtook human consumption in February, SiliconANGLE reported separately.

Microsoft, Google, Zoom and Slack have all been adding agents to their collaboration suites. Cisco's approach differs in leaning on outside agent platforms rather than relying only on its own models.

What to Watch

The near-term milestones are RoomOS 27 in November and AI Agent 360 general availability in December. The Dialog beta and on-premises model hosting, both slated for early 2027, will show whether Cisco can sell regulated customers on agents that run inside their own data centers. SiliconANGLE's report did not include pricing for the Anthropic and OpenAI integrations.