We witnessed several AI-driven innovations that are set to redefine the landscape of customer and employee experiences. Cisco demonstrated advanced tools and devices that enhance collaboration, automate and scale customer interactions, and bridge the gap between physical and digital experience. Here are World Wide Technology's key takeaways from this annual conference.

s it time to plan for an upgrade again? Cisco has announced that the timeframe between major and minor version releases of their Cisco Unified Communication Management (CUCM) application is accelerating. The accelerated time and frequency level of upgrades is pushing businesses to have robust, validated, and "ease of use" processes to perform upgrades. We had a global financial customer request we build a lab environment in the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to help them perform testing on the software upgrade process for their multiple CUCM clusters.

The United States Army requires robust, secure and reliable communication tools to ensure efficient and effective collaboration among its personnel. Cisco's collaboration suite, which includes unified communications, conferencing and collaboration endpoints, is ideally suited to meet these needs.

Contact centers and voice calling have expanded the attack surface. While CISOs and cyber security leaders are doing their best to defend against bad actors, voice calling is a vulnerability that is often overlooked.

With an increase in the number of people and families working from home at the same time, being able to alert your spouse, partner, children or roommates that you are on an audio or video call is becoming increasingly important.

Moving to hybrid work will require organizations to reimagine their office spaces. Our experts break down how to evaluate hybrid-office technology to determine what is right for your organization.

Digital workspace leaders face five key challenges in optimizing the digital employee experience in 2021: employee engagement, organizational silos, technology and data sprawl, limited budgets and solution misinformation.

After virtually attending Cisco WebexOne, one of the industry's largest digital collaboration conferences, we've identified five key takeaways for Collaboration and Workforce Productivity leaders.