San Jose's Cisco Is Putting AI Agents, Including Anthropic's Claude, Right Into Webex Team Chats

Cisco, the San Jose networking giant, wants AI agents to sit in your work chats like coworkers. At its WebexOne conference this week, the company said Webex users will soon be able to @mention AI agents inside group "spaces" and hand them tasks that the whole team can see and build on.

In its announcement, Cisco gave this example: a team member asks an analytics agent to pull usage numbers, then asks a presentation agent to update a PowerPoint deck with them. Agents can also be brought into meetings and calls through an assistant side panel. A Cisco spokesperson told Computerworld that during calls, those agents are visible only to the individual user, not to the whole team.

Claude and OpenAI join in

The biggest name in the lineup is Anthropic, the San Francisco AI company. Cisco said Claude Managed Agents, which are cloud-hosted agents that work through multi-step tasks in the background, will be able to join Webex conversations as team members. It also announced a connection to OpenAI's new "dots" personal agents. In the future, dots will run inside Webex as an always-on personal assistant.

"The next era of work isn't about bolting chatbots onto yesterday's tools," Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel said in the release.

Cisco also announced Personal Agents for Webex Calling. These can screen your calls, talk with callers to figure out how urgent they are, and act for you. Computerworld reported that they, the new Webex app and the collaborative and third-party agents are due in the first quarter of 2027. A Translator agent covering ten languages is in limited release, with a full launch planned for November.

What it will cost

Some AI features come at no extra charge with Webex Suite, which costs $25 per user a month. The more advanced tools, including collaborative agents and call-screening agents, will require a new AI add-on arriving in the coming weeks. Cisco hasn't announced its price.

Metrigy analyst Irwin Lazar told Computerworld that Slack and Zoom are making similar moves. He said Cisco's goal is to keep Webex as the place where people work, rather than losing them to separate AI apps.