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With most productivity suites now offering some kind of generative AI services or tools, it seemed inevitable that Cisco would, in turn, bring AI into its Webex collaboration platform.
If it has taken a bit longer than Microsoft, Google or even Zoom to update its offerings, Cisco at least has caught up. At its annual event this week, Cisco explained not only how it is adding generative AI to its products, but also announced a number of other additions designed to improve work conditions in the digital workplace. Its announcements broadly fall into three categories:
1. Summarization Capabilities in Webex: Webex will automatically generate meeting summaries and action items after each meeting. For customer service workers, new chat and call summaries will provide users with a fast, automated way to consume long-form text from digital chats with collaborators as well as facilitating post-call wrap-up and resolution with customers.
2. New Carbon Emissions Insights Feature: Cisco's new feature, an expansion of the existing Carbon Emissions Insights feature it announced earlier this year, will help organizations meet their sustainability goals by analyzing current data center emissions resulting from the usage of Cisco collaboration devices, meetings, messaging and calling. Cisco claims to be the first in the collaboration industry to provide such real-time sustainability insights.
3. AT&T Calling Partnership: Cisco plans to integrate Webex's enterprise-grade calling capabilities with AT&T's 5G network so that users can seamlessly collaborate across multiple devices with a single business mobile number while on the go. This integration furthers Webex's efforts to empower the mobile workforce with solutions that support flexible work and enable efficient collaboration.
Unlike many companies that have taken the generative AI route, Cisco says it will be using its own Large Language Models (LLMs) rather than partnering with third-party vendors. Cisco hopes that by having direct control over the data its AI models are built with, it will be able to manage privacy issues that have come up with competing products such as GPT-4.
Cisco said in a statement it has already created a first set of principles that include multi-modal support, permissions, privacy and accuracy for its enterprise-grade AI. Models will use data that workers already have permission to access, based on the privacy and security rules assigned to a specific data source.
Automattic Brings Generative AI to WordPress
Automattic, parent company of WordPress, Tumblr and other web content tools, has added an AI assistant to WordPress to help users generate content more easily. The AI assistant, dubbed Jetpack, will be able to generate a wide array of content — headlines, translations, even entire blog posts — with the click of a button.
Jetpack has launched with support for 12 languages including Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean and Hindi. Users are allowed to make 20 requests as part of a free trial, after which a subscription to the service costs $10 per month.
Microsoft Will Bring Work Suite To Apple's New Headset
Apple's long-awaited unveiling of its new Vision Pro mixed reality headset is one of the biggest tech stories of the week — or potentially even the year. But at a cost of $3,499, the device, at first glance, it does not appear positioned to be a realistic option for either enterprise or most consumer buyers when it launches in 2024, no matter how useful it might be.
Headsets, though not yet in wide use, are already a hotly competitive marketplace — and most entrants are cheaper than Apple's. Many products slated for the coming months that will be considerably cheaper, including Meta’s Quest 3 at $500, or even the Meta Quest Pro at $1000. Even Sony has a cheaper option with its $550 Sony PlayStation VR 2.
However, almost as soon as Apple finished its reveal, Microsoft said that it was ready to bring some of its core productivity apps including Word, Excel and Teams to the new platform. According to reports in Onmsft, a brief demonstration of what is on the way showed the apps running inside the headset, which can be controlled by the users’ eyes. The display used a simplified ribbon interface similar to what is already available on standard versions of Word and Excel.
The report added that while Apple did not show much of the Teams interface, it did point out that Microsoft has plans to use 3D persona features, which will be created using advanced machine learning. Zoom and Webex will also reportedly offer these 3D personas.
In addition to the integration of Microsoft’s apps, Vision Pro will also be compatible with thousands of previously developed iOS and iPad apps.
MicroStrategy Deepens Analytics Partnership with Microsoft
MicroStrategy, which develops enterprise software for business intelligence, mobile intelligence and network applications, announced a new multi-year partnership with Microsoft.
The company said in a statement that the partnership will expand the availability of MicroStrategy’s products on Azure and will integrate its analytics capabilities with Azure OpenAI Service to help businesses harness the full potential of their data.
The result will provide a massive boost for the MicroStrategy ONE analytics platform, which the company describes as a single platform for all analytics use cases.
MicroStrategy indicated it expects users to be able to use its platform in conjunction with natural language capabilities for generating new visualizations and dashboards, to productivity enhancements related to code, workflow, schema and content creation.
The partnership will also integrate MicroStrategy’s products with the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. The company singled out Teams and PowerPoint as particularly important in this respect.
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Instabase Raises $45M
Finally, this week, San Francisco-based Instabase, which develops an analytics platform that enables users to understand and draw insights from unstructured data, said it has raised $45 million in a Series C funding round led by Tribe Capital. The new investment brings the company's valuation to $2 billion.
Instabase also announced the release of AI Hub, a repository of AI apps focused on content understanding and a set of generative AI-based tools.
According to a statement from the company, AI Hub is a self-service solution that offers everyone access to content understanding capabilities. One of the first apps, Converse, gives workers the ability to hold interactive conversations with the system, question it about existing content and summarize content that exists in documents or spreadsheets. It also offers tools that can build workflows that will enable users to analyze similar types of documents so that users will, for example, be able to build an app to automate the extraction of data from one kind of financial document and use it with another kind.