The new workplace: powered by AI and Collaboration Devices

Table of Contents:

• Distance Zero: Transforming the Conference Room
• Integrated, AI-Powered Devices
• Introducing Board Pro G2
• The challenge of open desk spaces in a hybrid office
• Cisco’s innovative solution: Cisco Desk Phone 9800 Series
• Scalability, Management and Interoperability

Work is not where you go, it’s what you do. In today’s hybrid work revolution, ‘where we work’ no longer has boundaries. A waiting room, a kitchen table, a coffee shop – employees have learned how to work productively and effectively from anywhere.

Still, the office remains relevant in 2024. There are types of collaboration experiences that thrive with togetherness – experiences like training, and ideation. Cisco has been redesigning its offices to support these new hybrid work experiences all around the globe.

Distance Zero: Transforming the Conference Room

In transforming our own offices, one thing became clear: today’s workplace needs to support remote employees. After all, 98% of meetings have at least one remote participant. So, our north star for our collaboration devices is to reduce the impact of distance. We call it “Distance Zero”. The idea is to build workplace devices that, quietly supported by powerful AI, make it feel like you’re in the room with colleagues regardless of where they are in the world. It’s an objective that is years in the making— we partnered with NVIDIA to build our RoomOS platform on the Jetson family of modules back in 2016 because we knew the future was AI. It’s a decision that created the foundation for a myriad of audio and video intelligence tools for hybrid work, including our market-leading Cinematic meetings.

Integrated, AI-Powered Devices

Powerful software experiences come to life when coupled with powerful hardware capabilities. In listening to our customers, we realized a significant need for hardware that supports small IT teams with scaling AI-powered experiences across multiple sites and a lot of spaces. And so last year, we announced the Room Kit EQX – an integrated solution that is simple to deploy at scale, eliminating the inherent complexity and cost of multi-technology room solutions.

We continue to innovate and simplify the deployment of AI-powered experiences. In 2017, we pioneered the first all-in-one collaboration board, and launched an iteration of that – the Cisco Board Pro – in 2021. Today, we are excited to announce our newest iteration, bringing advanced, AI-powered experiences in an integrated form factor.

Introducing Board Pro G2

An incredibly capable all-in-one solution, the Cisco Board Pro G2 has dramatically enhanced video capabilities for a couple of reasons. It features the 96MP Dual camera system first launched in our Room Bar Pro, which captures higher-quality video of those standing at the board whiteboarding, as well as those sitting farther away at a conference table. Board Pro G2 has a powerful new NVIDIA AI module, so it’s future-proofed to support tomorrow’s advanced AI innovations, like Cinematic Meetings. Due to its fully integrated form factor, it’s fast to deploy, easily adapts to your spaces with a variety of mounting options, and provides repeatability to scale the device across any number of rooms without advanced technical skills and effort required.

As you can see in the demo above, a myriad of intelligent capabilities work together to build our ‘cinematic’ meetings experience. First, the device supports multi-stream technology – as shown in the demo above. This allows us to send two signals into the virtual space: a close-up of the active speaker and an overview of the entire room. This prevents virtual participants from missing out on rich, in-room contexts like nods of approval, quick asides, and even where eye contact is directed.

Next, what we call ‘cross view’- multi-camera intelligent switching as shown in the demo above – is now generally available to our customers.

A new aspect of our Cinematic experience is an AI virtual zoom, which uses intelligence to clean up otherwise grainy zooms of participants sitting far away from the camera. This allows the device to produce a clear image further into the room and allows IT teams to deploy the Board series in larger rooms than ever before. The AI virtual lens will be available on both the Board Pro G2 and the Room Bar Pro.

The challenge of open desk spaces in a hybrid office

In speaking with our customers, we know that many employees go to the office 2-3 days out of the week – and those employees need space to touch down. For a customer call, for an hour of heads-down work between meetings— there’s a significant use case for desk spaces. The traditional concept of dedicated personal workspaces is fading, raising the question: Without a personalized desk setup, what’s the incentive for employees to work from the office?

Some of our customers have explored a host of solutions to make desk spaces “work” in hybrid work: wayfinding for finding an open desk, reservation panels to reserve it, and collaboration devices to take calls or meetings from those spaces. But the logistics of setting up individualized technology in every desk space can be daunting for IT teams. The costs of labor, installations, cabling, and permits are substantial, not to mention that these tasks often fall on the shoulders of small IT teams. How can customers effectively scale this?

Cisco’s innovative solution: Cisco Desk Phone 9800 Series

An idea born to reimagine open desk space technology in a scalable, sustainable way, we are so excited to bring the Desk Phone 9800 Series to the market. More than a phone, this device is deployed at an incredibly affordable cost, by simply connecting to the network. It can also be provisioned without ever opening the box, due to its NFC tag, which makes it easy to provision at mass. In just one device, customers get a host of solutions

• Desk Reservation System: Without dedicated desk spaces, employees are looking for a way to know they’ll have a place to touch down before coming into the office. So, employees can reserve their desks with Cisco Spaces using a Web App on their mobile device or at a Board Pro in reception. Users can also simply walk up to any available phone and check in with a QR code.
• Personalization: Once checked in, the phone is personalized to the employees profile, allowing them to make calls from their profile, access contacts, and their calendar to seamlessly join any meeting at the touch of a button.
• Great Audio with AI: Open desk spaces are… noisy, and not always a good environment to take customer calls. At Cisco, we’re considering how our devices support great audio interactions, so the Cisco Desk Phone 9800 series features noise removal on both ends of the call. The device is designed for great audio, too. The built-in speaker is enhanced by a larger speaker driver and new bass-enhancing acoustic enclosure for more natural-sounding voices.
• Customizable Action Button for Workplace Safety: Keeping IT in mind, we know that every customer deployment scenario is different. So, we’ve adapted to the changing needs of the office with a customizable action button, which can be configured to call functions like IT support, emergency calls, and more.
• Sustainability: Our goal at Cisco is to reach net-zero by 2040 – and we know that sustainable practices are important to our customers. Crafted with over 74% post-consumer recycled materials, the 9800 Series features low-energy modes to support Smart Buildings and ESG objectives, and will be EnergyStar certified.

Scalability, Management and Interoperability

Our entire portfolio of devices is designed with two users in mind: the end-user, and the IT deploying them. Like all of our devices, the 9800 Series is manageable through our single-pane-of-glass Control Hub. IT teams can even see a hop-by-hop network path and monitor network quality, since the 9800 Series features a ThousandEyes agent. We’re also excited to share that our Certified Devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms now also feature a ThousandEyes agent, for clearer visibility and management across our customers’ entire environment, regardless of platform. This is also the case for two newly certified devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms – the Cisco Room Kit EQX and Cisco Board Pro G2. The former is the first integrated dual-screen system for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. With our vision to provide our customers with a complete portfolio certified for Microsoft Teams, we are excited to share that our true wireless earbuds, the Bang & Olufsen Cisco 950, are now certified.

Our vision is to reduce the impact of distance for everyone, regardless of where they sit in the world or in a reporting structure. We also understand that to bring this vision to life, we must consider the scale of our IT and facilities partners. We are so excited to introduce both the Desk Phone 9800 Series and the Cisco Board Pro G2, devices designed with scale in mind; and there’s more to come. Stay tuned.

Learn more:

• Get in touch with us
• Join us for weekly live demos of our latest workspace experiences
• Cisco and NVIDIA: Announcing New Devices and Experiences