AI Receptionist
I led UX end-to-end on Cisco’s AI Receptionist, shipped into Webex Control Hub under direct pressure from RingCentral and Zoom. The job was the surface where an admin decides what the AI is allowed to do, then finds out what it did.
context/
Webex Calling competes with RingCentral and Zoom Phone in enterprise cloud calling. Both had launched AI receptionist agents (automated reception that routes, screens, and responds to calls), which opened a category-credibility gap. The mandate: ship an AI Receptionist into Control Hub, the admin platform, on a compressed timeline, calibrated for enterprise compliance and admin-grade control.
role/
UX lead and IC end-to-end, in Cisco’s PM–Architect–UX triad. The PM owned the roadmap. I owned the admin experience, the parity-versus-differentiate calls against RingCentral and Zoom, the phasing, and the per-phase feasibility calls with engineering.
what i drove/
- Product direction: defined what “AI Receptionist” means for the admin persona, not the caller. How an enterprise admin sets up, governs, monitors, and overrides AI-driven reception across their org.
- Competitive positioning: ran teardowns of RingCentral’s and Zoom’s offerings and drew the parity, skip, and differentiate lines, leaning on admin-grade configurability and compliance hooks.
- Phasing: structured the program from foundational admin setup through Beta and GA to the Cisco Live vision horizon, each phase scoped to a time-to-market thesis rather than a feature wishlist.
- Feasibility: drove multi-version option exploration with engineering and AI teams, making the per-phase achievability calls.
outcome/
- Phase 1 foundational setup and Beta shipped.
- General Availability in May 2026.
- Phase 3 vision presented at Cisco Live, June 2026.