#312 Anurag Dhingra: Inside Cisco's Vision for AI-Powered Enterprise Systems

These days when someone asks me, like, what's new, I think they expect me to start talking about AI. And, of course, there's a lot of AI innovation happening, but networking is foundational. And our goal right now is to apply AI to solve real world problems. And then when we talk about collaboration, it's all about delivering a delightful experience. How do we remove distance between people? So, you know, people who are in a room and people who are remote All fields like together, the technology kind of fades away, and then you can focus on having a conversation. And then how do you improve productivity by leveraging AI, agentic AI, increasing? So that's what's going on at a very macro level. And if you go back, way back, your native networking, there were so many different type of networks, and you had to be on a certain network to talk to people who are also on that network. Couldn't talk across these networks, and that's the problem that Cisco solved. So it was all about interoperability and connecting disparate things. You don't have to focus just on the products that we have. I'm happy to have a conversation about that. Yeah. I'm certainly interested in how you view agents in the enterprise as the challenges there. So let's start by having you introduce yourself to listeners, how you got to Cisco, what you do there. Yeah. So thank you for having me, Craig. I currently run the enterprise networking collaboration business at Cisco as the general manager of both of these technology areas. I've been with Cisco for almost two decades now. I started as a software engineer and then slowly took on sort of leadership roles and progressively increased the scope of what I do at Cisco. Right now, like I said, I'm responsible for the enterprise networking and the collaboration business. Okay. Yeah. I wanted to hear about what's new, obviously. You're responsible not only for the networking, but for the collaboration tools. Is that right? And when I think of collaboration tools, yeah, I think of Webex. Is it broader than Webex? And if so, in what way? And what's new with enterprise connectivity? So two parts to it. Enterprise networking or enterprise connectivity as we like to call it is really about the infrastructure of how people connect to the network, both inside of an organization but also across org boundaries including connecting to the Internet. So that's the connectivity part of it. And then on top of that, the collaboration tools. And Webex, traditionally, is known for video conferencing, video meetings. We also do calling. We have hardware that we build for conference rooms, so that enables people to have group meetings in the conference room. We are also in the contact center and customer experience space. So all of that that part of the collaboration portfolio. And these days, when someone asks me, like, what's new, I think they expect me …