Cisco Webex, Soon With AI Canvas, Proves Reality Of ‘Better Together’ Story: Executives

‘The way that my leadership team interlocks together is around making sure that we can have connected tissue between our products, so that when someone thinks about buying a Cisco product, the feeling they should get is that all Cisco products look and feel like an integrated platform, rather than individual components and a collection of brands,’ said Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s president and chief product officer, at WebexOne 2025.

Cisco Systems wants to extend its platform approach across all its business units as the company promotes its “better together” story.

To that end, Cisco took to its annual collaboration event, WebexOne 2025, to reveal that AI Canvas, which was first introduced at Cisco Live in June, will be brought into Webex Control Hub, Cisco’s central interface for collaboration management.

AI Canvas is a generative AI workspace, built on Cisco’s Deep Network Model, that lets NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams collaborate, optimize operations, while reducing IT strain. As part of the Webex Control Hub, Cisco AI Canvas will introduce multi-player, multi-domain troubleshooting through the generative UI, natural-language interface for IT administrators in charge of collaboration environments. This integration will let IT admins proactively diagnose and resolve network, video, and call-quality issues—all within a unified platform, Cisco said.

[Related: Cisco WebexOne 2025: The Agentic AI Collaboration Updates Unveiled]

“We are hot on AI Canvas,” said Joe Berger, vice president of digital experiences for solution provider giant World Wide Technology (WWT), one of Cisco’s top partners. “Where that’s going, especially AI for IT operations, we’ve seen a lot of interest in that segment and that’s going to be big for Cisco.”

Giving partners and enterprises access to real-time troubleshooting and shorter resolution times for their collaboration environments is important. It also proves that Cisco is working to integrate its various tools into one pane of glass, Berger said.

“That’s something we’ve all been asking for years. I think Jeetu [Patel, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer] did a good job of bringing all the different product units together,” Berger said. “That ‘better together’ Cisco story is finally starting to happen.”

Bringing AI Canvas into Webex Control Hub will integrate the company’s full AI troubleshooting capabilities into collaboration, which is needed because resolving issues often goes beyond the collaboration domain, said Amit Barave, vice president of product management, Webex Suite and Webex AI during WebexOne 2025.

“So many times, our Control Hub does a superb job in terms of troubleshooting and finding problems, but then fixing the problem goes beyond the collaboration domain. It often gets into networking [or] security, and things that are detected in, let’s say matters of minutes, take days to get addressed,” he said.

Cisco’s ‘Better Together’ Platform Approach

Integrating AI Canvas into Cisco’s collaboration suite is just one of the ways that the tech giant is working to ensure that its once-siloed portfolios — networking, security, data center and collaboration — are becoming more interoperable, and therefore, more valuable to end customers, according to Cisco’s Patel.

“For the longest time, we operated like a holding company. We had done a couple hundred acquisitions and the mental model that people had was: ‘In order for me to be progressive in Cisco, I have to be a GM and I have to have my own marketing, sales, engineering [etc.],” he said.

But there’s been a shift that’s been happening over the course of the past 12-18 months internally at Cisco, Patel said.

“Anyone who [thinks] that their path to progress is for them to own their own kingdom is going to be sorely disappointed at Cisco. We’re going to make sure that integrated platform trumps individual capabilities of individual products. Our breadth, which had become our liability, should actually be one of our most treasured assets,” he said.

It’s a shift that Patel wants the market and enterprises to understand as well.

“The way in which we’re incentivizing our people [and] the way that my leadership team interlocks together is around making sure that we can have connected tissue between our products, so that when someone thinks about buying a Cisco product, the feeling they should get is that all Cisco products look and feel like an integrated platform, rather than individual components and a collection of brands,” Patel said.

Similar to how it will integrate with AI Canvas, Cisco Webex, for example, is already using AI Defense, a security tool to safeguard against the misuse of AI tools, data leakage and increasing cyberthreats, to ensure that the models the company is building in collaboration are safe and secure, said Anurag Dhingra, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise connectivity and collaboration, for Cisco.

AI Canvas within Webex Control Hub integration will be generally available in the third quarter of calendar year 2026, Cisco said.

“We have the most broad portfolio of infrastructure that any company has right now, and it’s our superpower, but we have to make sure that that comes to life in its fullest form,” Patel said.