Steve  0:00  
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Steve  1:02  
Welcome to the System of Records show. My name is Steve Boese. It is great to be with you today. We have a great conversation today all about work, the future of work, collaboration, the role of AI, and how that's changing work, and as we dig into enterprise tech more and more on the show. These conversations about how folks are going to manage these transitions is going to become increasingly important. So today, to help us learn more about that and talk about it, is we have Snorre casbou from Cisco. He is the SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration. Sonora, welcome to the show. How are you today?

Snorre Kjesbu  1:44  
Thank you very much, and thank you for having me, Steve, I'm looking forward to the discussion.

Steve  1:50  
Yeah, me too. I love this topic a lot, and I think you're in a great you're a great person to talk about some of these issues from your perspective at Cisco. First of all, maybe tell us a little bit about what you do at Cisco. We all know Cisco, but I'm wondering if some people don't know everything that Cisco is involved in, particularly and how they're impacting things like the employee experience and collaboration and that that important enterprise work.

Snorre Kjesbu  2:15  
Yeah. So you know, Cisco is doing a lot of things we work on, you know, enterprise networking and, you know, data centers, we work on, on security, we also deliver collaboration solutions. And I'm running the collaboration business for Cisco. So that's things like contact center calling meetings suite, which has to do with employee engagement, but also devices like video conferencing gear and phones and and that type of things. And I'm based here in Silicon Valley.

Steve  2:46  
Okay, yeah, there's nothing better when you go into like, a conference room and they have that great technology, like on the wall right there, to sort of engage with the folks who are outside of the room too. And I mean, there's nothing better than that. It's, I don't know, maybe I'm a geek on that. I think that's so cool and so much fun. So it must be fun for you too.

Snorre Kjesbu  3:05  
Oh, absolutely. And you know what, Steve, what I really love doing is to jump out of bed every morning to create truly magical products, truly magical experiences. You know, that gives us a kick and and really making sure that technology is approachable, the technology is there when you need it, and and that's all about focusing on the experience.

Steve  3:31  
Yeah, I'd love to get into that some more snore like, how technology is really changing the way folks experience work. I mean, I suppose we don't need to do like a history lesson for listeners anymore, but certainly we know work got changed forever, right with through the pandemic era when so many folks went home to work or then adopted hybrid schedules as time went on. But how people work together, how they collaborate and connect, all of a sudden became, it was always an important issue, but it probably became almost the most important issue for many organizations. I'd love to maybe hear some of your thoughts about working through that, that era, if you will, in sort of how that's changed work even today, in 2025

Snorre Kjesbu  4:20  
I think it's it's absolutely essential, and I think it was a absolutely critical shift. So the way I think about it is that, if we think about meetings and and video conferencing as well, it was a useful tool for a long time coming the pandemic, and now after the pandemic, has gone from being useful to being mission critical. And what that means is that not only do you need to create a great tool that's doing what you believe it's going to do for people are actually using it, but since it's mission critical, it also has to be right for the ones that own and operate it. In every, every company, because the expectation to a collaboration tool is that it works always, every single time the way you expect it to work and and also, there is a an influx of new technology that we can, we can talk about even later, but I think that major transition, transition is from useful to mission critical and and that shifted things a lot. The other big shift is that during pandemic, the pandemic, people moved everywhere. And even if we have a lot of companies now with with people returning to the office, being in the office on multiple days, etc, you still have a lot of people that moved far away. That means that there's always one person, two people, several people, that will be remote. So I would say almost 100% of meetings I'm in there is at least one remote participant. That means that there's always it has to be technology presence in all meetings, in all venues. So it has changed the venues as well. And then the final one I put into the big shift as well, is that when you we ask people to come back, we need to earn the commute, and we earn the commute by making sure that the offices and where we go back into, that those venues are better than what we have at home. You know, at home, we have our coffee machine, we might have our head, you know, a good chair, all those type of things. We don't even have to go in the car and spend half hour, 45 minutes, an hour in the car. How do you earn the commute? And I think that earning the commute is also a key thing here, after the pandemic.

Steve  6:51  
Yeah, and I think a big part of that, Snorre, is the collaboration capability and experience that folks have, because we hear over and over again right on, on this return to the office conversation, that people value it, of course, but they value it for working with other people, right, collaborating with other people, and connecting with other people. And even, even if you've got everybody coming back into, say the location prep, say out in Silicon Valley, where you're at, well, you've got colleagues all over the world potentially, right? So the the need for this kind of digital, remote, kind of collaboration did, doesn't, doesn't end when we decide, okay, let's have more in office work at all. Right? It becomes, as you said, every meeting has some element or some aspect of it that's important, which is a great point. I think it's under, it's underappreciated.

Snorre Kjesbu  7:43  
Yep, no, you're you're spot on. And not only that, but I think with AI, and I'm sure we'll talk about later in the call as well, is how do you use the tools, even when they're known remote, and because the tools are coming are so powerful, Steve.

Steve  7:59  
yeah, for sure, you mentioned AI. I'd love to talk about that some more as well. And you know, I'm sure lots of folks who are listening to this have had the experience I just had one last week, as a matter of fact, where I was on a quite a large call with with folks from a number of different organizations. And I swear there was seven or eight folks on the call in you know, it's video call, and five or six, you know, AI note takers like, turned up to the call as well, some some of which were representing people who maybe didn't show up to the call, and others were sort of alongside their human colleague that they brought to the call. And I thought about that a little bit and said, Boy, this has changed a lot, right? This is just one small, little example, but two, three years ago, that was not a thing, right? We working with these kinds of tools in the in in kind of close collaboration was, was not a thing, and now it is. And so I'd love for you to maybe give some thoughts around how you're thinking about collaboration and helping organizations works with some of these challenges. Of, okay, we've got these AI tools that are part of our workflows. We want them to be part of the workflows, but how do we work with them? And how do we sort of get our hands around that? I'd love your some thoughts on that.

Snorre Kjesbu  9:17  
Yeah. So for us, it always starts with the experience and and really the key things we're doing there, Steve is around a vision we put out there, which is what we call Distance Zero. So what do we mean by that? That is really how to reimagine how people connect and work and and Distance Zero is really about trying to remove the barriers and creating seamless human connections, and that's across teams. It's across locations. It's across platforms. Because you want work to feel natural, you know, yeah, great technology is there in the background, I jokingly say to my team, we never. We're going to win the Oscar for the Best Actor. We should be the Oscar for the Best Supporting Actor. That's the work of technology, right? And what we want to do with Distance Zero is to make sure we remove all of those barriers. So what we're doing is that we're intentionally designing our platform to integrate with enterprise platforms so the collaboration and business processes can come together smoothly. So it's not only about all the things we do with multiple cameras and making sure that everyone is seen and heard and have the same space at the table, but it's also about how we integrate with enterprise applications. And then we're doing another thing, and this is something that comes back to I worked in in Denmark for some time as well, and the Danes have a wonderful expression, and they say we want to be at eye height. And I think that's a really, really good expression. One of the things that we've done is, in our software, we try to make sure that everyone are always at eye height, so that in a meeting you have everyone should have roughly the same presence. Should presence. You should try to be at eye height. And do that. We're using that technology into into into Distance Zero.

Steve  11:20  
Yeah, that's, I've never heard anybody talk about that, but that's really interesting, because it's something that we've talked about on we've done this like, as we do these recordings, often we'll say, Oh, I look smaller than you. Move closer, move back away, right? We try to do those things to make sure, you know, we appear as colleagues, right and on the same level, but the fact that you guys have are building that into the tools to account for that is fascinating, I think, really, really thoughtful.

Snorre Kjesbu  11:50  
And it puts everyone on a an even playing field and and when everyone has the same presence, you know, we can Really focus at what's at hand, and that's also part of of of the Distance Zero. And if, if I can bring this a little over into how we think about AI, tools and capabilities. You know, you're not in a single meeting these days where this is not discussed, and rightfully so. It is the biggest transition in our lifetime, full stop. But I also see that for a lot of companies and organizations I'm with, is overwhelming. And you know, people are discussing, how am I going to manage this? How I get value from all of the different solutions and what I feel when I talk to a lot of customers and partners and organization and people, they're throwing everything into a big saucepan, and they're making a big stew out of it, and the whole thing becomes overwhelming. You can't like any good stew. You can't really see what's in the stew and and and what you want to do is you really want specifically made dishes where you could see what's in them, right and, and when you have a stew, it's hard to realize, how do you get real value out of it? So what we have done is to try to break this apart and break AI down into clear, manageable pieces, and I can talk about how we have done it, yeah, and then I will challenge the whoever is listening to think about, okay, what are my AI dishes? So, so when I talk about AI dishes for collaboration, I think about three dishes. One is having AI at the edge. Second one is AI in the cloud, and the third one is AI for control and manageability. And I can talk briefly about those three.

Steve  13:54  
I would love if you could give us an example. Say what the what those different categories mean, because it's fascinating that you're thinking about it that way.

Snorre Kjesbu  14:02  
Yeah, and for other organizations, it might be four or five or six dishes. So for us, AI at the edge. That is that in our video conferencing gear, we've worked with Nvidia for over a decade, so we have AI and AI processing capabilities all the way out the edge. We use that for things like AI Director, that can automatically produce the best possible image and everything from that room. It can recognize people. You can do things with voice, et cetera. So you have aI capabilities out at the edge. That information is not leaving the device at the edge, and then you have AI in the cloud that is more around large language models. In our case, we use that for things like transcriptions, translation, summarization, note taking actions, even scheduling meetings, et cetera, et cetera. That's where you get into your large. Language models and trying to get the content out of that meeting. And in Cisco's case, we're actually agnostic there. And then the third one is back to when you started in this conversation, is that people that own and operate, if this is mission critical, now, how do you own, operate and scale your collaboration investment. You do that by having good manageability and controllability tool. And we actually use AI there as well, which is things like aI canvas, AI to monitor, AI to even agnostically Make changes. So in our discussions, it became so much easier when we said, okay, the three things we're doing at the edge, fine, that's one problem that's not going anywhere. Just go in the cloud, large language models. There is a lot more discussion there around, you know, guardrails, responsible AI, et cetera, et cetera. Third one around giving the IT organization really superpowers by using AI for control and manageability. And I think breaking it down like that helped us. And I think looking at your own on business as well, where can I get started immediately, and what are the harder problems and and get going with different dishes, not a stew.

Steve  16:21  
I appreciate you breaking that down, star, because I do think you're right. In terms of a lot of organizations right now are caught up in this, we've got to use AI. We've got to start implementing AI across our business processes, and the various functions often are going down different pathways, maybe working with different point solutions out there that they might have to support different processes and for whether it's it, whether it's CHRO, whether it's, you know, the CEO, whoever it is, right, like to understand an organization, what's going on with all this, AI, and I think maybe you, I'm sure you saw this nor a week or two ago. I think it was Gartner, right, or Forrester, one of the one of them doesn't matter. I won't besmirch either, but one of the big consultancies came out and said, Oh, we think 95% of enterprise AI projects are not working, or they're not delivering the value that that people expected that they would deliver, when I don't think that's probably true. That seems really high. But the second part is, I think part of the problem would be that, right, if organizations are just throwing all these AI solutions into a big soup pot or a stew pot, as you say, then it's going to be hard to get value or determine if you're getting value right out of them, because the control is not there.

Snorre Kjesbu  17:45  
Yeah, and I think it's a brilliant comment, Steve, and here's how we think about it. And Jeetu Patel, who runs all products at Cisco, as a president of products, he says the following statement. He says, we typically over estimate the impact in the short term, and we underestimate the impact in the long term. Yeah, and and every industry, every organization, is different. So I think what, what every organization needs to do is find out, where can aI have the biggest impact for you, and then build the solutions that fit the goals. In addition to that, all organizations are battling two two problems at the same time, what is AI doing to my product, or my service or or what I'm delivering out to my customers, and now I talk about customers in the broadest sense, yeah, and how do I use tools myself to help me with busy work, help me with creativity, help me with with other things. And those two has to be disaggregated as well, because they're not the same and and I see a lot of companies that are super hungry at changing their products, but maybe not as aggressive in changing the way they work and behave. Yeah, and I think that again, having the two thoughts in the head at the same time is, is being able to do both just a couple weeks back in the organization that I run. It's an organizational many 1000 people. We actually stopped all work for a full day, and we had what we call AI at day work. Okay, no, sorry, I came up wrong. That's funny, AI at work day and and what we did was basically have everyone in the organization contribute talks. We had big webinars. Actually, we had over 120 different talks during that day of people that were sharing best practices. So it was all. Much like a grassroots ability. And the whole goal of that was not about how we change our product, because we work on that all the time, but it's actually on how we change the way we work, and highly inspirational by doing that. So I think again, how do we disaggregate AI and try to reduce the complexity and position ourselves in the way that we can adopt these technologies. And you you see that I get fired up about this. 

Steve  20:34  
I think that's a great example story. I think folks should, should definitely think about copying that in their own organizations, like putting together a similar kind of day for their internal teams to just share and talk and collaborate on this stuff, because the sense we get right, and we follow this stuff pretty closely too, is that, you know, there are more folks adopting AI just on their own right in use, in their own workflows, to support themselves day to day, right? And then just doing it, and in the enterprises, many of them are trying to catch up right now, right? And so the one of the remedies to that, I think, could be just, hey, let's have a big day or a session. Let's have more open dialog about how AI is being used already. Yeah.

Snorre Kjesbu  21:23  
And not only that, but I hear also another thing said a lot is like, Oh, how do we create a a learning experience? How do we train our people, etc. And I think all of those are good thoughts, but my answer to that is also, but we have something called the Internet. And if you sit down and you start using the internet for training yourself. It's actually a lot of things you can learn. I personally, I do another thing, and this, every evening, I literally sit down and I use AI tools for for half an hour, 45 minutes. And I some of that is just for fun, stupid ideas I have, you know, putting together playlists or creating cartoons or or things or or discussing stuff. And I'm every single night, I'm amazed of what I can do and and the type of things I can create. So I think that for all of us, it's also about, you know, it's here, and compared to a lot of other tools, it's interactive. You can actually use it to interact to with so, so it's there, and, and, and that is driving it.

Steve  22:36  
yeah, yeah. I've done similar things for I done a couple of country music songs, like from you know idea to the lyrics getting produced to then the actual music, which I don't do any of those things right, nor do I know how to do them. But I got two fairly respectable, you know songs out of it that I thought was were funny. But as you said, right, that curiosity then can lead some great ideas. They say, Oh, maybe we can do this, you know, with the team or and multiply that by 1000 people maybe right in the organization who are doing similar things, and all of a sudden, it's quite powerful.

Snorre Kjesbu  23:15  
No, you're right. And the other thing that I think, which is a paradigm shift that we need to think about that is that for collaboration, we've always been talking about people to people communication. I mean, that's where we come from, right? But there are two new facets of that. It's what we call, people to people, people to AI and AI to AI. And what do I mean by that? So, people to people is obvious, people to AI. I think we get that as well. That is things like having AI powered assistance that can provide with real recommendations. It can be context, it can be sentiment analysis. There's a number of things we can do. It can, you know, summarization, translate all the things we spoke about earlier, and that's how we as people interact with with AI agents. So that's the other one. It's people to AI, but then you have AI to AI. That's actually where AI agents are interfacing other AI agents. I spoke about our controllability, manageability situation that's giving it superpowers. But there you would have a number of AI agents who probably will talk to each other. You can look at the contact center business. You know, for years, we've been using real life example to train human agents, but now you will probably have AI agents that will monitor AI agents to provide feedback for how they're doing in a contact center setting, and also trying to improve of that and and what we call this is we call this connected intelligence, so people to or people to AI, AI to AI. And I think the that's the other paradigm shift in collaboration. Operation at the moment is really driving this connected intelligence. And when you start thinking about that, there are some fantastic opportunities and some some very, very interesting challenges to go solve for.

Steve  25:14  
Yeah, and I think that's kind of a lot of leaders, and I want to talk about leadership in a second. But a lot of leaders, right see that, or they, they understand that that's, that's a potential, I don't say end state, because end state is not the right word, but a goal, right? And a potential outcome where you could say, Wow, this would be amazing. We could have such tremendous efficiency. You know, if we had the an agent in the contact center, which was handling some of these first line inquiries that could then interface to the fulfillment folks. Maybe an order didn't get delivered or something, or it was the wrong product, or whatever, the things happened, right? And there's an agent over on an order fulfillment then then can pick that up and then orchestrate how that order is going to be remedied, right? Without with fairly little human intervention, probably on those on those processes and but these systems are completely different, right? That, and they're provided by different vendors too, right? The vendor that provides the contact center agent is probably not the same one that provides the organization with their their order management system, right? And all the agents that are associated with that, which is what gets tricky, right?

Snorre Kjesbu  26:23  
I think that's where a lot of the development is going to happen, is actually, how do you make them interface? And that's where the AI to AI comes into it as well, and where we'll see the big shifts coming there. So I think if you look at contact center in particular, I mean, a lot of the basics of that was developed in the 1970s and 80s. And a lot of the things you see there has been around for for some time, and then we've added integration to CRM tools and other things that we've gone along now it's in a lot of these things. It's a new restart with the the advent of of AI coming into it.

Steve  27:00  
yeah. It's, it's, like you said earlier, it's like the biggest shift we'll see in our careers. I'm imagining in maybe for some time after that. The last thing, Snorre, I wanted to make sure we talked about a little bit, was, you're a leader, right? Have a lot of folks in the organization there wrestling with these issues and embracing them maybe is a better term than wrestling with them, but I'd love to talk a little bit about if you think leadership needs to adapt as well, not just adapting to new tools being in place in the organization, but just how we're approaching leadership, particularly in an area where some folks certainly may be concerned, right about automation and AI and perhaps being a threat to jobs, maybe being, I don't know, just like there's concerns out there, there's I read this morning, a very large bank talking about, Oh, I think with all this AI, we'll be able to do the job with a couple 1000 people that we used to do with 10,000 people, right? So these kinds of comments are out there, and they're out there in the world, and I'd love maybe to your thoughts on just as a leader, how you think about working through some of these issues with either your teams or just in general, right? How you think about that?

Snorre Kjesbu  28:23  
Yeah, so I'm, I'm mature enough to been through a number of shifts already, from no internet to internet, from being internet to cloud, and then going mobile, etc, right? And now we're driving AI, and in all of these shifts, there are changes to the type of jobs we're doing, and they're new jobs being created. Yeah, you know, there is no other option than to lean in and and, and that's what we need to do, because there are things that we are spending time on today that we will not need to spend time on tomorrow. That's a good thing, and I think that as leaders, the way we need to work on this is to work with our organizations and work through that change. And that opened up a whole avenue of new opportunities, of what we now have the bandwidth to go and do. So I think of this as a massive opportunity. You know, I have incredibly good people on the team. I mean, they're amazing people, and a lot of them are doing busy work that can be taken over by AI, but that frees up a lot of capacity that can be used on more innovation, more ideas. Doing things better and adopting new technology is a big change, and, and, and some of the way. Is that organizations can bring their people along. That's really by combining, you know, easy to use technologies, make sure that you speak to people across the organization that did you drive it forward, etc, and, and I think that the opportunity in that is is is much bigger than what we're going to lose. And you we can just go back and look at some of the other transitions that we've been been through, what that has created, of new type of job opportunities, roles, etc, and things that were done when, when I got out of university, there are no long, long no longer done. And I don't think any of us would like to go back to yellow pages. And you know, I'm just saying, I mean, we are. And so the my philosophy here is lean in and do it right, and then, personally, I have a leader philosophy as well, which I call do things with a cool head and a warm heart. What I mean by that is that that we need to do what's right, and we need to do what's right in these transitions, and then do it in a way where we take good care of the people that we're working with and to bring them along, because we need good people now. We need good people next year, and we need good people in a decade from now,

Steve  31:31  
Snorre, I think that's a great way to think about it. Honestly. I love that. I love that sort of approach, that credo, maybe is the right word, I don't know, but I think you're right. I do think you're right, because I just feel like, maybe I love history I love reading history books, and I feel like, yes, these technologies are amazing, they're transformative, they're disruptive, they're incredible, but so was electricity, so was the steam engine, right? So was the internet, right? So, and they have, as you said, rightly, they've all led to changes and transitions, but all kinds of opportunities and all kinds of new industries and increased growth and prosperity, largely right, in the places where they've been adopted, the telephone, right? We could go on and on, right, like it was. So, why would this change be that different, right? Why would this be the one that's going to, you know, throw millions of people out of meaningful opportunity? I don't believe it, personally.

Snorre Kjesbu  32:36  
I think that the powerfulness of this tool is, is just incredible. And the type of ideas we can throw by and help and scale so that we can go about doing new things and create and innovate, I think it's a massive opportunity. So, yeah, I would say there's only one way, and that is to lean in.

Steve  32:58  
Yeah, I love it. I think that's a great way to kind of wrap snorla With this conversation. The last thing I wanted to make sure I asked you, was Cisco's doing some really cool things, right, some really great, innovative products leaning into improving the employee experience through collaboration. Is there any one or two things you just want to mention? Hey, we're excited about this. Or this may be, you know, we're looking at this in 2026 anything you could tease for us, or preview or just anything you folks who want to learn more about what you and the team, do you know?

Snorre Kjesbu  33:29  
Thank you for giving me that opportunity. I think there are a couple of things, and we call them AI agents. So one thing we've done is what we call the AI Director. So okay, we've been working with being able to have multiple cameras in the room and capture multiple streams, etc. But what we created now is actually an AI Director that agentically will understand what's happening in a meeting, happening in a room, and they will then, by that, actually produce the best, optimal pictures and and connect the right people at the right time, so you understand where the discussion is happening in the room, etc. So it's almost like having a live television director, except it is done, done by by AI. So you can think of it like now any meeting can have a professional producer, so to say so that's one cool. That is cool. The other one is AI agents that we use in meetings. And one now that we launched a couple of weeks back is that the agent will listen into the discussion and it will understand that there will be a follow up meeting from this meeting, then it will actually provide a proposal for who should be part of that next meeting, the follow up meeting with an proposed agenda. And it will have checked everyone's schedule to see when we can have that meeting. And it will propose. Suppose that, and then a human will then actually press the button where to send it out. And I think having those type of tools there, I mean, none of us like taking notes from a meeting. This is super to take it out. No one thinks it's that funny to create a new meeting and set up the agenda, etc, to have AI agents that can help with that. And that's out now. 

Steve  35:25  
And it helps make sure nothing got missed, nothing got dropped. How many times we've been in a meeting where someone just didn't take a certain note down in a certain way, and then weeks later, like, Oh, didn't we say this or that? Right? And happens every day, practically, but yeah, those are great examples, Snorre. Thank you for sharing them with us. Super cool. I would love to like get a look at that. AI Director particularly, that just seems amazing. But I want to thank you for your time today. This has been a really fascinating conversation, and honestly, why we wanted to talk with you and learn more about what you're doing at Cisco for system of record, because these these issues are so important. They impact every organization. And I love your approach and your thoughts, so snort. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Snorre Kjesbu  36:13  
Thank you very much for having me!

Steve  36:16  
Thank you again to our friends at Cisco for helping us get this set up. Thanks to our friends at Workhuman as well. I want to remind everybody to sign up and subscribe to the System of Record and the HR Happy Hour Media Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Go to hrhappyhour.net. for all the archives. Okay, that's it for today. My name is Steve Boese. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time on the HR Happy Hour Network. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai