2923: Cisco Live: Webex's Vision for AI in Hybrid Work

[00:00:00] Are you and your business truly leveraging the power of AI in your workplace? Or are we merely scratching the surface despite the hype that we're seeing on a daily basis? Well today I'm joined by the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing and Customer Officer at

[00:00:20] Webex by Cisco. Her name's Aruna, and she is a trailblazer with over two decades of experience in driving technological and workforce transformations. And in the episode today, Aruna will share her insights into the evolving landscape of

[00:00:36] work, and of course the pivotal role of AI and how it is shaping our professional environments. And Aruna brings a wealth of knowledge from her time at some of the most influential tech companies around the world. She has a robust background in both engineering and marketing,

[00:00:53] and she's also uniquely positioned to discuss the convergence of technology and customer engagement. And not only that, she's a visionary in digital marketing strategies and an advocate for women in STEM. And her perspectives on the future of work are not only innovative, but trust

[00:01:12] me when I say deeply inspiring. So buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way onto the show floor of Cisco Live here in Vegas, where you can join me and Aruna in conversation today.

[00:01:27] So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Hi, thank you for having me on the show today. I'm Aruna Ravichandran. I'm the SVP and Chief

[00:01:38] Marketing and Customer Officer for the collaboration business, which we also call Webex with Cisco. So really excited to be here. Obviously, Cisco Live, so much going on, so many big announcements. What excites you most about everything that you've seen and heard?

[00:01:53] From the collaboration business, we have launched some amazing innovations today and brought it to market. If you think about the collaboration business here at Cisco, there are two areas we actually operate in. One is around hybrid work and second one is around customer experience.

[00:02:07] And both of them are board level initiatives. And you might ask, why are they board level initiatives? Because they're really tough problems to solve. So if you think about some of the exciting innovations we launched here around customer experience, it's all around

[00:02:21] AI. And same thing around hybrid work. So as an example, on the customer experience side, we brought so many different AI innovations to market over the last six months. And a lot of those are now with our beta customers. And we did a survey with over 1000 plus of

[00:02:39] our end users. And what we learned is that how they're actually using AI in order to make their life much more beneficial is just amazing, especially on the customer experience side. We heard that the call volume and the call rate has gone down tremendously because

[00:02:54] they're actually leveraging a lot of the innovations we have done with AI. Same thing on the hybrid work side. We have also brought to market various different innovations in order to help the unsung hero, which is IT, right? Like those poor administrators, they

[00:03:08] work day in and day out. And so one of the key things which I absolutely love outside AI is being able to troubleshoot using remote device management. So let's say we're in this conference room, and you can see our beautiful Webex board here in that particular

[00:03:26] in this conference room. And let's say we were collaborating with our Webex board pro and you run into an issue. So now IT will have do not have to send anybody to the room,

[00:03:39] they can log in remotely, and they can troubleshoot, which means that we gave them a lot of scale. So you don't have to have people in that particular location. And they'll be able to magically solve any kind of a problem very, very quickly, even before the problem

[00:03:54] is actually occurred. So that's one. The other one which we launched is we had launched our beautiful desk phone. It's not even a phone, it's a desk device. And let's say it was in this particular room. And now with the collaboration we have with Cisco Spaces, you

[00:04:08] will be able to reserve a desk wherever you have a desk phone right from your home. There through the mobile app, it'll give you the entire, it'll tell you all the available spaces

[00:04:18] in the building. And you hit one button and that room is basically held for you. And you can come back into the office and go into your desk. And the desk phone transforms that into your desk for the day.

[00:04:28] Wow, that's incredibly cool. And in a former life, I was the IT support guy that would be sent into a boardroom of 50 people having to fix it in front of everyone. I still get

[00:04:38] flashbacks from those days today. So that is a big problem to solve. And one of the things that I love is you mentioned that your customers have problems that need solving. And you mentioned solving the problems before mentioning AI. And very often we hear about AI

[00:04:52] before the problem. So I commend you for that. And when you're talking about some of those problems that you're fixing, how is WebEx by Cisco integrating AI to its platform? And are there any future advancements that you foresee as well or anything that excites you?

[00:05:06] So how we are integrating AI, let's talk about the customer experience side. Right. So this is around solving tough problems for the world of contact center. So let's say you have an

[00:05:16] issue and you call into the contact center. Most of the times what do you get? You get this annoying virtual agent, right? Like press one for this, press two for this, so on and so

[00:05:25] forth. And after pressing all those buttons, you still don't get an answer to your solution. And then you say operator, operator, zero, zero. And it takes you to the operator. That's the world we actually live in. Now with AI, which is built into the contact center, when

[00:05:40] the call gets escalated from the virtual agent to a physical agent, you don't have to repeat yourself again. Because many times you'll have to repeat the whole thing which you have gone through with the virtual agent. Because with our virtual AI summaries, automatically that

[00:05:55] will get to the agent as soon as you basically talk to the agent. So you don't have to repeat anything. And the agent will automatically know the conversation you have had with the virtual bot. So they'll be able to provide you with unparalleled customer service. Wow.

[00:06:09] That's one use case. Another use case in the world of contact center is when you do a call, how many times do you basically fill out a survey response? I would say zero for me. And

[00:06:20] what we see is that only 2% of customers actually fill out a survey response, which means that 98% of them don't actually respond to any particular survey. So how would you train the agents? How can supervisors in contact center train agents? So with generative AI, we

[00:06:37] now come up with our own CSAT score, which is not available to anyone but to the supervisor. And after every call, we will have a CSAT score based upon that call. It could be a

[00:06:49] virtual call, it could be a voice call or it could be a chat. And we will assign a CSAT score using our AI capability. And that will be now available to the supervisor for them to

[00:07:01] basically assess the call and then use that for training purposes in order to make the agents much more stronger than they are. And the third area, which is really something which I hold

[00:07:12] very close to my heart is around being able to tackle a fairly hard problem in the contact center industry, which is agent turnover churn. Right? The churn rate is extremely high. If you look at all the professions in the IT industry, the churn rate, especially in contact center

[00:07:28] is over 50%. Highest turnover rate. And why is that? Because those poor agents, they go through their eight hour days being shouted at, screamed at, yelled at across the board while they're trying to solve the customer problems. And so what we have launched with our AI is we

[00:07:46] have the ability to automatically detect that the agent is experiencing a lot of stress symptoms with our AI. And when we figure out that the agent is experiencing a lot of stress symptoms with something called topic analysis, because your tone changes, your language changes when

[00:08:04] you're actually chatting. And we now have the ability to basically provide a course of action in order to basically rectify that. What could that be? We can, the supervisor could say that,

[00:08:15] oh my God, this guy is starting to experience a lot of stress. So let me basically escalate it to another person. I can give that agent a break. I can give them a Thrive Reset break, which means

[00:08:28] that we have created a partnership with Ariana Huffington's company. It's called Thrive Reset app. And you can automatically take a break where you have an opportunity to watch a video, which something you love, which is what you call a Thrive Reset break, which all plays a tremendous role

[00:08:45] towards helping you with mental health and empathy so that you can change the way you actually train those contact center agents. And you give an option to basically reduce the churn rate. These are

[00:08:58] all AI capabilities. I just talked to you about a couple of them. But if you think about the hybrid work site, especially you and I are in, let's say we are on a video call. And many times I go from

[00:09:09] meetings to meetings to meetings, and I have to drop my daughter for a soccer lesson. And I end up being 15 minutes late to a meeting. And now with AI, I no longer have to worry about joining a

[00:09:20] meeting couple of minutes late. It will automatically sense I joined the meeting 15 minutes late. And it'll tell me you missed the meeting 15 minutes, do you want me to catch you up? So I don't

[00:09:32] need to message a co worker who's in that call and say, Hey, can you fill me up? I joined the meeting 15 minutes late, right? So that's another amazing functionality which is now built in and a lot of

[00:09:42] customers have it in production. And they're using it. Another functionality is meeting summaries, right? Like my chief of staff doesn't have to take those scopiest notes anymore. Right after the

[00:09:53] meeting is done, it could be a one hour meeting, it could be a two hour meeting, it will give me all the action items, it'll summarize all the meeting summaries. And it could be a recorded call, it has

[00:10:02] the ability to break up that meeting into chapters. Instead, let's say I was on vacation and the meetings were recorded, I can come back, I can get a meeting trailer, which is a one minute meeting

[00:10:13] trailer, which will basically tell me all the important elements of the meeting. And then I can go into the chapters where I want to see instead of having to watch the whole meeting for a whole

[00:10:21] hour. Right? So all of that is generated with AI. Another functionality is being able to actually have the opportunity to search, right? Like you are messaging in multiple different spaces. And as the

[00:10:35] day goes along, I like I'm in this podcast with you today. As soon as I step out, probably I'm getting messages from 10 and hundreds of spaces, people messaging me asking me questions. Now I can

[00:10:48] prioritize with AI, where I can basically go and ask AI like, what are the spaces where I have to basically answer this question, give me a summary of instead of having to look through a lot of the

[00:11:00] messages, give me a summary, it'll give me a message summary. So that will help me prioritize and give me back time into my calendar. So these are some of the amazing functionality, which we have launched

[00:11:10] with AI and there is more to come. And if you think about the contact center world, especially, we have solved one of the toughest problems in order to make agents effective. But what about the virtual agents?

[00:11:22] That's where you're going to see a lot more innovations in AI, which we are going to launch at WebEx One, which is our annual conference, which happens in Miami, in South Beach, Florida in the month of October.

[00:11:34] Wow, incredibly cool. And one of the things that I love there is, I think you're solving one of the biggest problems about meetings. And the amount of times I've heard people say that was another meeting that could

[00:11:43] have been an email. And it could quite literally be an email now, could be if you get that full transcript and 100% takeaways. And with the ongoing evolution in the future of work, are there any trends that you think

[00:11:55] will have the most impact on how an organization will operate in the years ahead? Any other trends you see there? I think the two biggest trends I see is AI. As you can see, people are starting to see most people are talking

[00:12:09] about AI, but we are actually doing AI with a lot of our customers actually using it in their live environments. And I think the second one is going to be around sustainability, being able to promote much more of a greener Earth, being

[00:12:21] able to build devices and technology in order to help that. I think every company I think has a net zero goal. We at Cisco have a net zero goal by 2030. But if you think about all multiple different people, different companies, they

[00:12:37] everybody's trying to solve for a better and a greener Earth. And I think sustainability is going to become even more important. 100% with you on that. And of course, many companies are currently facing the challenge of balancing remote work with in

[00:12:51] office requirements as well. Any advice you'd give to any organization looking to develop more effective remote working policies? I think being able to have like a good cadence and a structure, I think is always important. Flexibility definitely gives

[00:13:06] you the opportunity to attract a diverse set of talent. And I have a global team of 200 plus marketeers around the planet. And so I have a flex policy. And here at Cisco, it's very much flex policy. But I would say predominantly having a set of, I

[00:13:25] would say, key things which are core to the business where everybody basically has a seat at the table. And it starts with clearly well defined goals. I also have something which I believe in clarity is kindness, being very clear in terms of what you're

[00:13:41] actually expecting from your employees while giving them the flexibility to basically deliver against those particular goals becomes important. And having a set of rituals where people actually come together, whether you're doing remote work or

[00:13:53] physical work. And right now it is a blend of both, I think is also important. And here within the collaboration within my team specifically, we have built a culture which we call the ICE culture, which is around innovation, courage and empathy. And the

[00:14:09] entire organization is behind that. And everybody basically lifts the talk and walks the walk. And titles don't matter. And how people actually come together in order to basically live that is something which is most humbling, which I've seen throughout my

[00:14:24] career, I would say. And I would say, so to answer the question, coming up with a set of rituals which work for that particular team matters. Coming up with a way where you give flexibility, while at the same time, you're able to basically help people manage towards

[00:14:42] goals actually matters, I would say. And I think your passion for this topic really shines today and indeed with your work at Webex. So are there any insights you can share on

[00:14:52] how Webex is helping to enhance user experiences to ensure seamless and more inclusive communication for both remote and in-office employees? We've heard in the past, in the office versus out of the office, but it's almost we need to remove that divide.

[00:15:08] So one, yeah, so it's there all over our product side. So one of the key things, especially if you think about, let's say people come back

[00:15:14] into the office, gone are the days when everybody used to come into the office all the time. There is always going to be one meeting,

[00:15:21] every meeting where there's one person who's going to be working remote from home. And you want to make sure that you've solved that particular

[00:15:27] problem so that everyone feels included and everybody's got an equal seat at the table. And the way we have done that is if you think about our collaboration devices, which is in every meeting space around the world, we have something called frames. And we have this concept called

[00:15:42] distance zero, which is our mantra, which is there with our devices, which means that distance zero means the distance between the people, whether they're in the conference room, or somebody's working from home, the distance is zero. Right? That's why we call it that is our North

[00:15:57] Star when we build those beautiful devices. So how are we able to achieve that? Here are some of the examples. So let's say four people are in

[00:16:05] the conference room with us right now. And then two people are working from home. You know what kind of a thing the people at home are going to see?

[00:16:14] They're not going to be seeing a large conference room with four people. They're going to see each one in a separate frame. So usually, what you're

[00:16:22] actually going to see is this particular conference room with this many seats and person sitting very far from the camera is going to be a very small

[00:16:29] face, you can't even see the reaction or anything else across the board. But that is not what they're going to see. They're not going to see this room.

[00:16:36] Everyone becomes a frame. Because of our advanced facial recognition technology, we have the ability to basically divide that up. And then the speakers will

[00:16:45] follow everyone. So let's say this room can take about 12 people. And each one becomes very, very small for the person working from home, it's very

[00:16:54] going to be really hard. Because of our advanced cameras with our distance zero capability, the cameras will follow your voice. So you are going to be crystal

[00:17:03] clear and the person at home is able to see the person's face in full form. So those are some of the capabilities we have launched within our technology in

[00:17:13] order to create distance zero experiences, which is inclusive experience. So that way, there is no difference whether you're working from home or in the office or anywhere in between. Everybody's got an equal voice and equal seat at the table.

[00:17:26] And that brings me to something because before I knew when I found out I was going to be talking to you here at Cisco Live, I did a little research on you. And I read

[00:17:34] that you're an advocate for women in STEM. So I know this is an area very close to your heart. What initiatives or strategies do you believe are most effective in encouraging and supporting women?

[00:17:44] I think that it is a really important topic. And especially when it comes to women, I think women tend to doubt themselves more than men do. There is this whole

[00:17:53] concept called unconscious bias, which was done by Stanford University, which means that if you offer a job to a man, and he might have 50% of the skill set, and you

[00:18:03] offer the same job to a man and a woman, the woman might have 90% of the skill set, the man will say I can do the job in my sleep, the woman will say I don't have 10% of

[00:18:11] the skill set. So maybe I'm not the right person for the job. Right? And that's how people are wired. So being able to bring a lot more women into a STEM career gives

[00:18:22] them a lot of voice as well as seat at the table. And so if you go back to my own experience, I was born and raised in India. And for me, it was I had no set of

[00:18:33] options. It was either be an engineer, a doctor or a loser. So I had to pick one of those three courses of action which my mother gave me and I decided to become an

[00:18:42] engineering profession got my bachelor's in computer science, and then a master's in computer science. And I had a very good career as an engineer for about 10 plus years at

[00:18:50] Hewlett Packard. And then I decided to move to the marketing side. And I've spent about close to 15 plus years on the marketing side. But people will always ask me, why did you

[00:19:00] make the switch in career? And do you like being in the marketing profession? What I always tell everyone is having an engineering discipline has been a huge plus for me. Because taking

[00:19:10] complex technology and packing it and being able to simplify messaging is something which I would have not been able to do if I did not have a STEM background. And that has helped me

[00:19:23] tremendously across the board within my career. And it helps me differentiate myself and compared to a lot of my peers in the marketing industry. And if I now solve that back, and talk about bringing more women into embracing a STEM

[00:19:37] career doesn't have to be engineering across the board, any kind of a STEM discipline will always give them an opportunity to be independent. It will give them a course of action so they can start in engineering or they can even

[00:19:49] start in marketing, and they'll have an opportunity to find their passion. Because everything can be coached but not passion. And so if you find your perfect career, and it is backed by a STEM degree, it gives you tremendous opportunities across the

[00:20:03] board as you work in the workforce. And so the way I look at STEM career is you have to start influencing at high school grade. By the time people go into college, they've already decided on the discipline. Yes, they might

[00:20:18] have gone into an undecided major, but the train already left the station. And like I said, women tend to basically self doubt themselves a lot. So being able to go to not universities, but going to high schools and talking about opportunities that will basically come forward for you when you basically embrace any kind of a STEM discipline is a passion of mine. Both my daughters actually have a computer science degree, but they're not working in computer science at all.

[00:20:44] Really?

[00:20:44] They're in completely different professions. Both of them are in the creator economy. But both my girls tell me if they did not have the background of having a STEM discipline across the board, they wouldn't have been successful where they are. And so I go back with my daughters to the high schools in the community where I live and constantly talk about it. It would be fantastic if a lot more women do that. They can basically go back to the high school and influence those young minds. Then we'll have a huge amount of people who will actually basically go into the STEM

[00:22:44] world. Like people listen to podcasts, tell the story on various different social forms like LinkedIn and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook across the board and be genuine about it. And being able to translate that into a simple concept is also important because I think the hardest thing for technologists to do, and that's why I say I am so grateful that my mom guided me to basically go into an engineering career, because I think technology tends to be very complex.

[00:23:14] And we as marketers, we have a superpower. And if you are able to distill that complex technology and tell it in simple storytelling words, then it becomes even more powerful.

[00:23:24] And when you reflect on everything that you've seen here at Cisco Live and all the conversations that you've had on the show floor, interviews, etc., I've got to ask, what are you going to be thinking about on that plane ride home when you're thinking about everything you've experienced here?

[00:23:41] I think for me, specifically coming here to Cisco Live is an opportunity to hear from our customers, their stories, how their pain points are and how our technology is actually helping them. Same thing with partners. And then most important of all is to meet my team members as well as the other Cisconians and exchange stories with them.

[00:24:02] So, as I think about it, I think that we at Cisco, for us, our purpose is to basically build a single future for all. We are all about inclusive collaboration. And as I have seen things at Cisco Live, I know that AI is going to be huge. How can you be intentional about using AI to further enable inclusive collaboration? How can you make people's life much more enriching?

[00:24:29] And do it responsibly. I think AI is going to be so big, but it's also going to open up multiple different areas in terms of security. So how can you educate people on the opportunities that are going to be available for them? And it doesn't matter. It's not only about engineering. Even in marketing, leveraging multiple different AI disciplines to make my team's lives better.

[00:24:53] But how do you educate them? One, to basically have a lot of the resources available to them. But the second time to do it responsibly. Because I think while AI is going to be huge, but being able to do it responsibly is going to be important. And I think that is going to be the talk of the industry, whether it's Cisco Live, any other technology conference, it's all going to be about AI for the next at least couple of years.

[00:25:15] And I think that's a powerful moment to end our conversation on today. But before I let you go for anyone listening, maybe they want to find out more information about everything that's been announced about WebEx and Cisco Live or connect with you or your team if they've got any questions to ask. Is there anywhere you'd like to point them to online?

[00:25:31] So if anything on collaboration announcements, they can go to webex.com and they'll be able to see everything which we announced today.

[00:25:41] Fantastic. Well, I know how busy you are. Things are a little crazy here at the moment. But just thank you so much for sharing your powerful and inspiring story. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today. Enjoyed it.

[00:25:52] So as we wrap up our enlightening conversation with Aruna today, I think we leave with a broader understanding of how AI and flexible work policies are instrumental in shaping the future of our workplaces.

[00:26:06] And indeed, Aruna's journey and the advice that she offered today underscore the importance of embracing technology not just for innovation sake, but as a fundamental enabler of human connection, organizational growth and solving real problems.

[00:26:24] But what are your thoughts on integrating AI into your workplace strategy? How do you see these technologies influencing your daily work life and career path in the future and saving you time so you don't have to spend three quarters of your workday in back to back meetings?

[00:26:42] So please let me know your thoughts. Email me now techblogwriteroutlook.comx Instagram LinkedIn just at Neil C Hughes. I look forward to hearing from you.

[00:26:53] But that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. Hopefully you'll join me again tomorrow. I've already got several guests lined up on the show floor here at Cisco Live, but thanks for listening today. And until next time, don't be a stranger.