With all the conferences I have been attending lately, I am still catching up on my writing. Earlier this month, I was in Austin for Cisco WebexOne. There were announcements, keynotes and a series of conversations with Cisco executives. But the experience that stayed with me was a tour of Cisco’s downtown office.

Going into a WebexOne conference, you would expect video conferencing to be a big part of the discussion. That was certainly my expectation. I have known Webex for years, and the association is understandable. For many people, Webex is the meeting invitation, the camera, the microphone and the call.

After walking through that office and talking with the people responsible for the experience, I came away thinking that description leaves an awful lot out.

Webex is much more than video calls. And Cisco, by being customer zero for its own workplace technology, gave me a better way to understand what that means.

An Office That Brought Back Memories

The Austin office had an attention to design and usability that reminded me of an Apple-type experience. But something else felt familiar, and it took me back considerably further.

In late 2001, I started a company in Boulder, Colorado, backed by Mobius Venture Capital. We worked in its incubator space. Incubators were quite the thing back then, and this one had a thoughtful approach to how people worked.

There were private areas, phone-booth spaces, smaller conference rooms and larger spaces where teams could gather. Developers had room to work alongside one another. Different kinds of work had different places to happen.

Walking through Cisco’s office, I recognized that thinking. We had understood a good deal about the value of those spaces 25 years ago. We even had Cisco gear.

We did not have this Cisco gear.

What stood out in Austin was how the collaboration technology extended the usefulness of the physical space. The displays, cameras and audio were part of how people could work together, including people joining from somewhere else.

I discussed that comparison in my conversation with Anurag Dhingra, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Networking and Collaboration. The visit had broadened my understanding of what collaboration could encompass.

Think about the person at the far end of a conference table and the colleague joining from the other side of the country. Both need to hear the discussion. Both need to follow the material. Both need an opportunity to contribute. A room that looks terrific but makes either person struggle has missed something fundamental.

We Need a Broader Definition of Webex

The video call is the most visible piece of the experience, which makes it easy to mistake it for the whole thing.

Work also happens through phone calls, messaging, documents and exchanges that take place over hours or days. People need to prepare before they meet and follow through afterward. Customers need help that may require several employees and systems working together.

Webex spans those forms of communication and customer engagement. Cisco’s wider portfolio supplies the networking, security, devices and operational visibility that help support them.

That distinction matters. WebexOne is the conference. Webex is the collaboration platform. The workplace I visited brought Webex together with a broader set of Cisco technologies and physical design decisions.

For a business leader, the value is in how well that combination supports the work. Nobody wants to spend the beginning of a meeting figuring out why someone cannot hear, then spend the end reconstructing what a remote colleague missed.

Dhingra described collaboration across live conversations, messaging and shared documents, with context carried between those interactions. That is a more useful way to think about the problem than measuring the experience solely by the quality of a video feed.

Cisco Has to Live With Its Own Decisions

The customer-zero element gives this story substance.

Cisco uses its own technology in its operations and learns from the experience. The people designing and selling these systems have colleagues who depend on them. Someone has to install the equipment, secure it, maintain it and answer when something goes wrong.

In my interview with Christian Bigsby, Cisco’s senior vice president of Workplace Resources, he described approximately 300 sites across about 90 countries, encompassing roughly 15 million square feet. That includes offices, laboratories and some data centers.

Austin is a showcase within that footprint. It would be a mistake to assume every Cisco location looks or operates exactly like it.

Still, that scale gives Cisco plenty of opportunity to encounter the same organizational complications its customers face. Facilities and IT do not automatically have identical priorities. Security teams need to understand what is being connected. Maintenance responsibilities have to be clear.

Cisco acknowledges these issues in its published account of building its workplaces. Its teams describe vendor dependencies, testing requirements and the need to bring IT into planning early. They also discuss defining who supports the environment after installation.

Those lessons are part of what a customer should want from Cisco. A beautiful room gets your attention. Knowing how to keep it working is what makes the investment useful.

Give People a Reason to Come Together

As a CEO and someone who has built companies, I value what happens when people work together in person. You can resolve something in a short conversation that otherwise turns into a string of messages and another scheduled meeting.

Bigsby identified complex problem-solving, faster collaboration, relationship-building and learning company culture as reasons to bring people together. Those purposes should influence how space is designed.

He also described the economics of consolidating underused space and putting resources into a better experience within a smaller footprint. Businesses should pay attention to that. Maintaining rows of empty desks while employees struggle to find a suitable place to collaborate makes little sense.

At the same time, distributed work is an established part of business. People are at home, visiting customers, traveling or working in another office. I spend enough time in airports and hotels to appreciate that reality.

In our wrap-up conversation, Snorre Kjesbu, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Collaboration, emphasized supporting both office and remote participation. There will still be someone joining from elsewhere.

A better office should improve the experience for that person, too. Technology cannot reproduce every benefit of being together, but it can remove obstacles that have made remote colleagues feel peripheral to the conversation.

The Network Is Part of the Experience

My conversation with Michael Dickman, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Campus Networking, helped connect the visible workplace with the infrastructure behind it.

When a meeting performs poorly, the cause could be a device, Wi-Fi, the local network or a connection outside the building. Bringing together information from Webex, the network and tools such as ThousandEyes can help the people responsible locate the problem.

The same connected environment can provide information about room occupancy and conditions. Facilities teams can learn whether booked spaces are actually being used and whether the available rooms fit demand.

That is a practical connection between the employee experience and the people operating the building.

Several WebexOne announcements reinforced this direction. Cisco introduced Ceiling Speaker Pro as part of its integrated room-audio approach, alongside workplace planning and utilization capabilities. It announced RoomOS 27 for November and expanded meeting-platform support to include native Google Meet alongside Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

Interoperability matters. Your customers and partners will not all use the same meeting platform. The room needs to accommodate the people you do business with.

These announcements describe where the portfolio is going. They should not be confused with a list of everything operating during our Austin tour.

AI Becomes Part of Working Together

AI adds another dimension to this experience.

Dhingra made a point worth considering: as agents take on more tasks, the occasions when people come together to exercise judgment, develop ideas and build relationships become more consequential. That puts additional importance on making those interactions useful.

In my conversation with Craig Burnham, Cisco’s vice president of Product and Solutions Marketing, we explored people and agents working within shared spaces. A team could build on shared results instead of leaving each person’s AI work isolated in a separate conversation.

Burnham pointed to calendar Q1 2027 for the new experience. The direction is toward helping teams prepare, delegate work and follow through, with appropriate boundaries around access to information.

The customer-facing side extends the idea further. Vinod Muthukrishnan, who leads Webex Customer Experience, discussed maintaining context as customers move between interactions and departments. Cisco’s planned Dialog framework would help agents coordinate that work, including after a conversation ends. He said beta availability was expected in Q1 2027.

That is another reason the video-conferencing label is too narrow.

What Businesses Should Take From Austin

A tour cannot tell me the return on investment of an office or establish how every employee feels about working there. Those require evidence over time.

Businesses considering this approach should ask whether people use the spaces, whether remote colleagues can participate effectively and whether the environment is manageable within their budget. They should also ask what can be improved in an existing office. Few companies get to start with a clean sheet.

Cisco’s customer-zero experience can help answer those questions, particularly when it shares the adjustments and operating lessons alongside the attractive results.

What stayed with me in Austin was the connection between a workplace idea I recognized from my entrepreneurial past and capabilities we simply did not have then. The Mobius space gave us different places to do different kinds of work. Cisco showed me how much further that experience could reach when the technology and the space were designed together.

I went to WebexOne expecting to hear a lot about video conferencing. I left with a broader understanding of Webex, and a clearer sense of why Cisco’s own workplace is such a useful place to see it.