On a balcony in sunny San Diego, I found myself speaking with Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of The Collab Collective. The California sun was beating down, the faint smell of barbecue drifted over from somewhere nearby, and just as I pressed record, a rock band began to crank up their guitars.
Now, normally this would be the sort of thing that sends a journalist into a spiral of annoyance. But somehow it felt… fitting. A noisy band playing their own version of harmony, right as Cisco was taking the stage to tell the world it had mastered interoperability. The timing was uncanny, like a sound engineer had read the script.
Craig, of course, took it all in stride. He didn’t flinch at the music. He didn’t ask to move inside. He just leaned forward with that thoughtful, slightly conspiratorial air analysts get when they’re about to tell you something you didn’t know you needed to hear.
“What I see is that Webex isn’t just tying features to hardware anymore – they’re breaking free. This is about making AI and collaboration truly interoperable, and that’s a game-changer.” – Craig Durr, The Collab Collective
Cisco’s WebexOne 2025 was already being billed as the year of Connected Intelligence. And they certainly didn’t hold back:
- RoomOS 26, a huge leap from version 11, designed not just as an update but as a marker for 2026.
- Agentic AI everywhere – Notetaker, Task Agent, Scheduler, Workspace Advisor – not just answering questions but acting like digital teammates.
- Audio Zoning and Cinematic Meetings, because apparently your conference room now needs to be shot like an indie film.
- And the big one: deep interoperability with Microsoft 365 Copilot, Zoom, and Google Meet.
This, Craig explained, is where the real story is. Not in the glitzy demos or slick videos, but in the plumbing of enterprise IT.
Cisco showed a Webex meeting pulling in files from Outlook, while Microsoft’s Copilot could reach into a Webex transcript for context. It was bi-directional, smooth, almost cheeky in how it ignored traditional platform rivalries.
Craig grinned:
“If you haven’t looked at Webex lately, now is the time. The interoperability story – Microsoft, Zoom, Google – it’s incredibly powerful. But you have to get in and play with it to see how it really works for your organisation.” – Craig Durr, The Collab Collective
And that, really, was the note he kept hitting: play. Try. Experiment. For all the talk of agentic AI, Craig insisted the winners will be the organisations willing to roll up their sleeves and see what fits.
As the guitars from the balcony band reached their crescendo, I couldn’t help but think it was the perfect metaphor. Collaboration is messy. It’s loud. It sometimes makes you squint and wonder if the drummer is on the same beat. But when it comes together, it rocks.
And Cisco, with its open playbook and AI-powered riffs, clearly wants to be headlining the tour.
