 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, day three of our coverage of Cisco Live. We're pleased to welcome to theCUBE Keith Griffin, principal engineer, collaboration from Cisco. Keith, good morning. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So lots of announcements this morning, or this week with respect to collaboration, cognitive collaboration, WebEx intelligence, a lot of WebEx users out there, walk us through WebEx intelligence. Sure, WebEx intelligence and cognitive collaboration, it brings together a set of underlying AI and machine learning technologies. We loosely break them down into four areas. Relationship intelligence, which is where people insights would set. Computer vision, where we would see our face recognition and name labels for meetings. Multimodal bots and assistants, where we would have our WebEx assistant offer and audio and speech technologies, where we've got some interesting features like noise detection in meetings, when you get those like annoying dogs barking in the background when you're having your meeting. And also something that we were just about to release, meeting transcription, so that you can no longer have to take meeting notes and our intelligence platform will take the notes for you. All right, so Keith, Lisa and I did Enterprise Connect earlier and it's amazing some of the things that are happening. You talk about cloud and AI coming into meetings. Part of me is a little worried. I worked in telecom back in the 90s and it feels like in many ways in the last 20 years, we haven't gotten beyond the, okay, the first 10 minutes of the meeting, let's make sure everybody's in. Are the right people talking? Are the right people muted? I mean, the machines are going to make this real easy for us so that we can stop the human people messing it up, right? Exactly, and one of the things that's interesting about that, well actually, one thing I'll say is that I also came from telecoms in the 90s. I've seen that journey all the way through and I'm still six to eight minutes late for meetings when I start them and I'd love to blame the technology and lots of people do, but let's face it, hands up, we're factors in this as well. We have the most amazing non-cognitive features like one button to push, a single green button, I just have to push that to start the meeting. But guess what I have to don't do? I don't push the button because I'm setting up my laptop or I'm taking my code off or I'm generally getting settled in. So the technology assistance at this stage is really good and what we wanted to do was look at how can we take the friction out of joining a meeting even when we've got such a simple experience and we found that things like WebEx Assistant where I can just speak to the system definitely does that. It speeds the access to the meeting. But one of the things we tried out with WebEx Assistant which we're just about to release was called Proactive Mode. The Proactive Mode is where I don't even have to say, okay, WebEx joined the meeting. It says to me, hey Keith, looks like you're ready to start your meeting. Will I get it started for you? I simply say yes and while I'm setting up my laptop, taking off my code, we're right in and getting the meeting going. And that was something we came across during our early field trials and we saw a huge adoption from customers. So we got right on developing that and it's going to be available soon. One of the things that Stu mentioned, we were at Enterprise Connect a couple of months ago. One of my favorite keynotes, she's so animated and as she was on stage yesterday, she announced people insights a couple of months ago. Let's kind of dig into that as the relationship intelligence. What does that mean, what does that enable and how is that an enabler of reducing friction? Yeah, it's really on multiple levels I think. There's the before the meeting experience and then during the meeting. So one of the things that we found through a survey that we just recently completed was that, I don't want to misquote it but there was a healthy percentage of people, I'm going to guess it, about 14, 45% that spend a significant amount of time before a meeting, googling and figuring out who they're meeting with to try to find out more, to have that connection when they get to the meeting. So what if we could just dynamically do that and there was no need to go search or spend time ahead of the meeting? So that's one area of friction reduced or removed so you can go right in there and you've got that personalized briefing for the meeting itself. So what do I see? Is this, I'm logging into WebEx or is it before the meeting and what kind of information about the person I'm talking to does it populate for me? Yeah, so in the meeting itself on your roster you can click on a new icon that's beside the participant and you can find out public profile information about the user that's on the meeting as well as their corporate directory information if you're in that organization and also news about their company. So I would have the latest Cisco news and just a general description of what our company does and if I'm meeting with somebody else they see that about me. They see my education background and anything else I choose to offer and choice is important. The fact that me as an end user I'm in control of that. I'm in control of that data. I can edit it, I can hide it, I can delete it. I think that's really critical in this era of data privacy and machine learning centric solutions. So that's how it happens in the meeting itself and we're looking more also at personalized briefings and looking at how we can bring that forward and also looking at areas like how we could bring that into the video experience. You don't want to clutter the video experience with all of this information but it would be nice to have something more than even a name label which is useful to have maybe a title or a role or something like that. So we're looking at bringing that across the entire portfolio. All right, so Keith you brought up data privacy. Wanting to talk a little bit about some of the other products outside of just you know the base WebEx when you talk about things like facial recognition. Where is that today? We know it's a hot button topic. You know what are you seeing and what are the requests you're getting from customers? Yeah, we're pretty close to being able to release face recognition for name labels in meetings and the goal of the feature as the name suggests is just simply to put a name label on the user so that you have that more personal connection in the meeting. We're taking our time with the feature because we want to get the data privacy right from the beginning. It's not something I feel that you can add afterwards. You have to have a strong data privacy posture right from the beginning. So the types of steps we've taken are to make sure that this is a disabled feature so that an IT admin must opt the organization in and then individual users must also enroll and that enrollment step does two things. One, it gives us a picture so that we can calculate the mathematical representation of the user for that matching but also it offers the user the opportunity to consent to their face being used in the system and that's really critical again back to that point about users being in control of their data and at any point they can go back to that and decide I want to add a new photo. Maybe I want to do something like a photo with no glasses or with glasses or with a beard or without a beard to make the system more accurate. But they can go in there and have complete control over that, hide their labels, whatever it is they would want to do. Keith, just a follow-up on that. Maybe give us what differentiates WebEx from some of the other solutions out there when it comes to security and data privacy. So a lot of new players out there, how does Cisco look at themselves versus the rest of the show? Yeah, there's a lot of differentiators, probably longer than we would have time for today but if I take face recognition, for example, a lot of those user controls are really critical and important. The way that we can leverage the devices as well as the cloud I think is a really critical aspect of that. If I think about something like our noise detection which we haven't talked about from a data privacy point of view we do that in the device or on the WebEx client not streaming to the cloud and the idea is to reduce that creep factor at every aspect that we possibly can. So addressing data privacy mitigation at every single point, there's no single solution I think for it. So when you combine the user controls where you implement the feature, how you implement the feature and you roll all of that up it becomes a fairly significant differentiator. I did a session here yesterday where it was exclusively on data privacy and I couldn't even present my slides it turned into an interview. I just stood and answered questions for 40 hour because people are so interested in this but the feedback that I got was our posture on data privacy is something that makes the solutions deployable for enterprise customers and it was great to get that feedback. We've worked hard on it and we'll continue to do that. I think it's something that we actually need to lead with as much as the features themselves. So as we look at the WebEx platform and all of the expansions that Cisco has done one of the biggest complaints with collaboration that we all have as workers is this overload of collaboration apps and switching back and forth between WebEx and Slack and email and text and all these things talk to us about what you guys have done to mitigate that and make WebEx a more broad portfolio that will be a greater facilitator of less friction in collaboration. Well that's a really interesting area to talk about because there's two ways that maybe I would look at that. One is that from a platform point of view I think it's no longer good enough to just have phenomenal video and phenomenal audio and phenomenal share. We have to make sure that we've got these intelligent and contextual experiences woven across that and then that would bring me to the second part which is invisible AI. It's making sure that these experiences are, the user doesn't have to do anything to access them that they just show up like meeting transcription. So if I go back and look at a meeting recording afterwards and all of the notes are neatly organized and on a panel on the right hand side that's AI at work invisibly for me and when I go back to review that I've got everything I need but I didn't have to go do something to make that happen. So we're trying a lot to focus on these invisible cognitive experiences throughout the platform. Yeah, Keith, how about the ecosystem? You know Cisco talks a lot about its partners here. I went through the show floor, collaborations of big space there. Talk a little bit about the expansive ecosystem that the products is built. Yeah and one area in particular that has come up in the last month is that we were able to open source our MindMelt platform. So we acquired the company MindMelt two years ago and built WebEx Assistant using their phenomenal conversational AI platform and then took steps in Larissa Horton's group to open source that and make it available to developers and I saw some examples of that yesterday on the show floor. Really amazing what people have done where they've taken WebEx Assistant and combined it with bots and assisted technology that they've built on top of the MindMelt data science platform. So I was amazed because it wasn't so long ago when we did that and they have solutions already. So yeah, really interesting first step but there's a lot more we can do there. I'd like to see us taking WebEx Assistant and offering extensibility beyond just the MindMelt open source. I would like to see us look at a multi-assistant strategy which we've got where we could potentially integrate with some of the consumer systems that are out there, consumer assistance in particular. There's a lot that we've done but I think there's a lot more that can be done in the bots and the systems space. When we look at all of this innovation, the waves of innovation that we're writing, we're in the DevNet zone, Siziwi talks about the waves of compute, mobile edge, AI everywhere but also this demand for connectivity, the expansion of 5G that we're expecting, the adoption of Wi-Fi 6, how are some of those waves influencing how cognitive collaboration at Cisco is being developed? I have never talked about that but what I would say is that it comes down to one thing or maybe three things, data, data, data, right? That all of those systems produce lots of data. AI and machine learning lives on data. It's data and algorithms ultimately, that's what it is. It's, you know, there's tons of algorithms out there but those areas that you mentioned, those waves, they all produce lots of data and as long as we can act on those with data privacy in mind and provide compelling features to customers, I think that it opens up just way more opportunities and what we've done up to this point with Cognitive is really first step type stuff. As amazing as it is, a lot of it is based heavily on supervised machine learning. I think getting to unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and acting on those larger data sets is going to bring some really interesting solutions in the future. So Keith, look forward a little bit for us. But you know, all of this machine learning and AI has caused a real growth in some of the, in the breadth of the portfolio. What's exciting you that kind of the next six to 12 months? What spaces should we be keeping an eye on in your world? One of the areas I've been working most closely on is meeting transcription. And again, it's a tip of the iceberg type solution where we've got the meeting notes and that's great. But I really want to imagine where we could bring that next. So notes are great. But if I didn't have time to go to the meeting and I didn't have time to listen to the recording, probably not going to have time for 30 pages of notes. But what if I could get insights and actions? What if I could have WebEx Assistant help me with that where I say, okay, WebEx, what actions did I get on the 10 PM meeting yesterday that I missed? That to me is an area that I think it's not, it doesn't just personally excite me from a technology point of view, but I think it has far reaching impacts for users. And it's in approximately that timeframe. It's in, this is not five years away or 10 years away, we're getting there really quickly. So that is the one area that I would really pick out right now because it gives us the baseline to integrate with a lot of the other cognitive offers we have and really go somewhere with that. I would love that, you're right. I mean, who has time to listen to a recording, let alone read a transcript. Right? So that's something to look forward to in the future as well as next time you'll have to come back and give us an example of a customer that has, whether it's a bank or any type of other organization with a lot of workforce, distributed workforce and some of the big benefits all the way up to the business, the top line that they're getting. So we'll have to look for that for next time. I'd love to do that. Keith, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this morning. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right. First to minimum, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, day three. Thanks for watching.