Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe And More Bring Generative AI At Work To Where Work Is Done

AI is quickly changing the business landscape in nearly every category. Many leaders are giddy with the promise that AI will automate mundane tasks, write code, contextualize data to support decision-making and more. However, amidst these dreamy AI promises, a new narrative of opportunity and growth is taking shape as AI tools move from press conference announcements to true productivity tools.

Since Microsoft's first announcement of generative AI (GAI) search using ChatGPT in February, GAI has been a top priority for businesses worldwide as they envision a future where AI catalyzes increased productivity, efficiency and innovation. But it's not just Big Tech that has its sights set on AI. Business visionaries from companies of every size have embarked on a quest to uncover the true potential of AI and its transformative impact on how work is done. Companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, Zoho and more are helping those businesses realize that potential.

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This year's Microsoft Build 2023 developer conference was a prime example of companies setting up users—from developers to SMBs to individual contributors—for success. Moor Insights & Strategy CEO and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead wrote a complete analysis of the vast number of AI advancements Microsoft announced at Build 2023 that included some of my own insights. I want to build on that summary by looking further at how GAI tools introduced by Microsoft and others impact the everyday worker and how companies are building copilots and assistants into people's workflows to make them more productive in their day-to-day functions.

Extracting the most value from AI

At Microsoft Build 2023, one of the central themes was “copilots.” While AI promises to accomplish incredible feats in many different areas, for scope of impact copilots are especially important because of how these AI assistants help people with their everyday tasks. Take the Copilot experience in Windows 11 and Edge, for example. Users can access this feature from the taskbar, providing a consistent pane across all apps. The side-pane design reduces the toggle time for accessing information and aims to boost productivity. It certainly can save time, even compared to the first integration of ChatGPT into Windows 11, which took just a few clicks to access.

Microsoft's approach aims to complement people in their roles by integrating copilots directly into users' workflows. In Microsoft 365, the Copilot feature acts as a companion in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and more, running alongside users in apps they use daily. Microsoft 365 Copilot can boost productivity by providing real-time suggestions and assistance as users work on documents, presentations or spreadsheets. As users create content, Copilot analyzes the context and offers relevant tips, such as recommended phrases, data formatting options or relevant images to enhance the document. 365 Copilot is available now in a limited private preview, with broader availability coming soon.

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Zoho recently announced similar ChatGPT-driven capabilities for current users across several applications, including Desk, Social, Writer and Mail, where people do their regular daily tasks. Zoho's AI-powered assistants are currently available to all users, and the company says it is adding GAI to products across its platform.

Firefly and the content flywheel

Earlier this year, Adobe announced Firefly, its family of generative AI models that I believe delivers a human-centered approach to AI by empowering creatives to do their best work. As part of The Six-Five Summit this week, I enjoyed chatting with Ely Greenfield, CTO of digital media at Adobe, for a spotlight session: Adobe's Approach to Generative AI. For Adobe, Firefly is just one small part of the company's AI journey.

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As Greenfield explains, Firefly is the initial step in a broader plan to create additional models catering to different content types and addressing various use cases. This could potentially (likely) mean that Firefly will expand into video, audio and 3-D vector artwork, covering a wide range of creative applications.

Additionally, Adobe digital experience products will further benefit from GAI with the company's Sensei AI tool that can assist in developing campaign briefs, analyzing customer data, adapting images, targeting specific customer segments and optimizing customer journeys. The company aims to leverage these capabilities to generate compelling content and gain insights for continuous improvement.

For individual creators or large marketing teams, having the power to generate and iterate on content quickly—and on platforms they already use—is transformative. "We know from hearing from customers that the demands for content creation and content generation are bursting at the seams right now. As customer interactions get more personalized and focused, the content needed to be generated increases exponentially. Integrating generative AI into their tools and workflows will be a massive benefit," Greenfield said.

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Webex meeting summary

Cisco calls in GAI for its suite of Webex products

This week at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Cisco Webex announced several GAI summarization capabilities. Catch Me Up meeting recaps will offer meeting summaries with action items so that attendees won't miss anything. This is useful, for example, for someone coming in late from another meeting, plus it saves the more punctual attendees from having to repeat themselves for the latecomer. Conversation summaries within Webex allow users to give prompts and ask questions using AI as the keeper of information—allowing collaboration among participants without everyone needing to be present.

What I am most excited about in this context is summaries for Webex's Vidcast video messaging tool. Vidcast summaries will organize video information into chapters on specific themes or areas as well as overall highlights, so users can navigate to the information they need. These days, it is common enough to be double-booked and miss a meeting, only to watch it later. It is also not uncommon for a manager or coworker to benefit from knowing what transpired during a meeting they didn't attend. AI summaries are a game-changing time saver for these and other asynchronous collaboration scenarios. I am actually a big fan of “live” meetings, whether in person or by video call, but watching a playback of a meeting is my idea of torture. So summaries and transcripts are a big win for people like me.

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Cisco also announced conversation summaries in Webex Cloud Contact Center. Conversation summaries for contact centers allow for a seamless handoff during escalation or dropped calls and undoubtedly will make customer interactions more efficient. There is little that’s more frustrating than a lousy customer service chatbot or infinite-loop phone-tree failure when you need customer service. With conversation summaries, when you call back, the next agent will have all that information and be ready to resolve the issue.

All of the Webex summary capabilities will be available by the end of the year. While many of Webex’s competitors like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have already announced similar capabilities, these were necessary and smart additions for the Webex platform.

In Summary

In this ever-changing business landscape, the potential for humans to flourish alongside intelligent machines is vast when used responsibly. The copilot model shows how AI can enhance operations and workflows beyond mere automation by providing contextual help that extends the effectiveness of humans rather than trying to replace them. By harnessing the power of AI alongside human ingenuity, these companies are reshaping the future of their industries.

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Three insights you might have missed from the Cisco Live event

The mantra of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. was well understood long before Cisco Live 2023 kicked off in Las Vegas last week — future-proofing in an increasingly hybrid world.

But such a vision posed some big questions: How might artificial intelligence disrupt best-laid plans? And what might Cisco’s plan to respond to the future look like?

In a wrap-up commentary of the event written for SiliconANGLE, Zeus Kerravala (pictured, right at bottom), principal analyst at ZK Research, wrote that Cisco had rolled out the “most comprehensive set of announcements that I can remember” at this year’s event.

“They spanned the entire product set, but had a singular focus of raising the value of the end-to-end Cisco platform,” Kerravala wrote. “Accomplishing this would add value to both Cisco and its customers.”

In addition to commentary from Kerravala, theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Dave Vellante (left) discussed the road ahead and the broader solutions being built during SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio theCUBE’s coverage of the event. (* Disclosure below.) 

Here are three key insights you may have missed:

When it comes to companies that differentiate on ease of use, Furrier raised the example of Apple Inc. during an analysis with Kerravala, which is now worth nearly $3 trillion.

“Furrier theorized that if Cisco can pull this off, it can be the next trillion-dollar company. Cisco currently stands at about $200 billion in value, meaning $1 trillion would indicate a fivefold increase,” Kerravala wrote in his wrap-up commentary. “Can Cisco get there? Only time will tell, but the one thing I do know is that it won’t achieve this without the evolution to a platform.”

The shift in thinking also applies to the company more broadly, in an effort to move beyond a perception of Cisco solely as a networking company, according to Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research LLC.

“They are inherently involved with the creation and the delivery of applications. This stuff happens all over the place, and it’s making those network connections happen and then monitoring them … that is really their key to success moving forward,” O’Donnell said.

Part of what was revealed at this year’s Cisco Live event was the company’s vision for multicloud network and security, with a goal to unify its network and security offerings, in part, to enable developers to build on its platform.

When it came to the company’s message on simplification and complexity, Cisco received high marks, according to Vellante.

“Now, it’s got to play out over the next several years,” Vellante said. “To me, they announced three superclouds. They announced the networking supercloud, a security supercloud and a full stack observability supercloud, which sort of weaves through the other two. Now, over the next couple years, we’re going to see those things come together.”

In addition to that theme of simplicity, Furrier said he felt as though unification was another big part of Cisco Live — that even though the company used to have unified as a part of their compute model, in this case they were thinking bigger with unified platforms.

All of it together represents a big shift for the company, according to Vellante.

“Cisco’s in the process of moving from a product culture to a platform culture. From push the next feature to let the ecosystem and the customers guide us as to what features we want to enable on the platform,” he said. “That’s a different mindset, different thinking. The mindset can’t be understated. It’s the culture.”

Here’s the complete video analysis with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event:

Networking professionals often keep a close eye on Cisco Live, which often includes a number of product announcements. This year was no different, but most were geared toward building broader solutions, as Kerravala wrote in his wrap-up commentary.

During Cisco Live, the company rolled out upgrades to Panoptica, a cloud-native security development platform. Panoptica emerged out of Outshift, a Cisco initiative aimed at exploring new frontiers in cloud through research and open-source project contributions, along with new software development. Panoptica ensures security thanks to its end-to-end capabilities, covering areas from runtime to deployment, according to Vijoy Pandey (right, at top), senior vice president of Outshift at Cisco.

“It does everything from how, what and where in the application security space with the context and prioritization of attack parts,” he said. “Now, Panoptica is also tackling runtime security, deploy time security, as well as develop time security, because, again, it needs to be end-to-end. You can’t just look at runtime and forget about the developers. That’s where the friction is.”

That security market is, of course, large and fragmented, a reality that spurred Cisco’s new Security Cloud, which is a generative AI-driven approach to cybersecurity.

“The attackers are getting more sophisticated, they’re getting more coordinated, and our defenses are getting more isolated because of the point solutions,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of the Security and Collaboration Business Units at Cisco. “That just doesn’t make any sense. It should be the other way around.”

The company is also utilizing AI to incorporate features, such as noise isolation and voice optimization, into Webex to enable enhanced telepresence, according to Snorre Kjesbu, senior vice president and general manager of collaboration devices at Cisco.

“We’ve been working on machine learning and AI and had those features out in our products since 2016. We just launched a brand new product this week here at Cisco Live, which is the Room Bar Pro … it gives us 20 times the AI, machine learning capabilities that anyone has had in the past,” Kjesbu said.

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Snorre Kjesbu:

In an effort to bring automation to the factory floor, automobile manufacturer Audi AG has sought to revolutionize its production processes through the implementation of a smart factory.

“We wanted to go down this smart factory route. At some point we figured out, ‘Hey, we need to change something,’” said Henning Loeser, head of the Audi Production Lab.

That’s where the P-Lab comes into play, according to Loeser.

“We’re the group of nerds that get to play around with technology and figure out, hands-on, is this helpful for us in production or not?” he said. “[People in the data center] introduced us to the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and all of that.”

The company didn’t want to throw away all of its equipment just to change a protocol.

“We needed to figure out … how do you tunnel a field pass protocol that’s key for automation through a Layer 3 network to a hyperconverged infrastructure, that then does the compute and gets the data back down to the shop floor so that it does what it’s supposed to do? That was quite a challenge,” Loeser said.

Audi collaborated with Cisco to address part of its needs, with its eyes toward its goal of a more technologically advanced manufacturing environment. In addition to Audi, Cisco Live was an opportunity to hear from other companies that have incorporated Cisco solutions into their offerings, including cruise line operator Royal Caribbean Group. The company implemented a full-stack observability approach, utilizing Cisco’s AppDynamics.

The company had a challenge regarding customers informing the company that their website was down or that they couldn’t make cruise bookings, according to Alice McElroy, director of IT service management at Royal Caribbean.

“We started this journey of wanting to simplify and figure out, ‘How do we use tools to help us get out of that?’ We turned to [AppDynamics] at that point,” McElroy said. “We went through that transformation, and as we got AppDynamics in place, we were able to reduce the number of people that it took to resolve issues. We got great results in our mean time to resolution.”

Here’s theCUBE’s full interview with Henning Loeser:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event, here’s our complete event video playlist:

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU

Cisco brings generative AI to Webex and Cisco Security Cloud