By Marcus Law
Publication Date: 2026-10-09 14:01:00
I’ve spent this week at the Fairmont in Austin for WebexOne 2026, and the clearest message from Cisco was openness. In the space of one announcement, it confirmed that Anthropic’s Claude is coming into Webex, that OpenAI’s dots will connect to it through MCP, and that Cisco room devices will run Google Meet natively alongside Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Webex.
Between keynotes I sat down with Amit Barave, who runs the Webex Suite and AI, Espen Løberg, who runs Collaboration Devices, and Metrigy’s Irwin Lazar to work out what all of that means for the people who actually have to buy, deploy and govern it. Their answers make up most of this week’s roundup. Away from Austin, I also spoke to Brandeis University about why it moved its campus phones off Cisco and onto Zoom, which makes an interesting counterpoint to everything Cisco said on stage.
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