At a Glance
Travis Isaacs, Vice President & Chief Design Officer, Webex Collaboration, CiscoFocus Areas: Design, Product Management, IT Leadership Thinkers360 In-Depth Profile & Portfolio: Travis Isaacs Social Media: LinkedIn Highlighted Content: Design Executives—Don’t overlook this critical hire as you scale, Season 2, Episode 2: The Flywheel Effect, Travis Isaacs, VP UX Design |
Thought Leader and Influencer Interview
Thinkers360 thought leader interviews profile prominent members of the Thinkers360 community who embody the power of ideas in their work. In this edition, we speak with Travis Isaacs, Vice President and Chief Design Officer, Webex Collaboration, Cisco.
Travis, leads a global team of designers, writers and researchers for Webex, a leading real-time collaboration platform. Throughout his career of over 20 years, he’s designed for in-house teams, agencies and consulting firms, was a co-founder and most recently a product manager at Microsoft.
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Thinkers360: Tell us a bit about your background and areas of expertise.
TI: I lead a global team of designers, writers and researchers for Webex, a leading provider of cloud-based collaboration solutions which includes video meetings, calling, messaging, events, customer experience solutions like contact center and purpose-built collaboration devices. Throughout my career of over 20 years, I’ve designed for in-house teams, agencies and consulting firms, was a co-founder and most recently a product manager at Microsoft. Outside of work, I love spending time in Seattle with my wife Kristi, two tweens Audrey and Camille and two dogs Trudy and Penny.
Thinkers360: What are your current responsibilities and what is your typical day like?
TI: As Chief Design Officer at Webex by Cisco, every day is truly different. I meet with our design, engineering, and product management team members to ensure alignment across functions. My aim is to help them get inspired to improve the accessibility, inclusivity, usability and sustainability of the Cisco collaboration portfolio. I believe inspiration can come from many different places across our organization – from internal and external stakeholders to market trends we are noticing, to spur-of-the-moment ideas that make sense and materialize. I also meet with the Persons with Disabilities (PWD) Insights team where I get the opportunity to meet one-on-one with people with disabilities and hear feedback directly from them about the accessibility and usability of our products. This time is essential to ensure new features and products are not only hitting the mark, but exceeding expectations on inclusivity.
In my free time, I participate in Cisco’s Global Executive Shadow Program, a grassroots effort to develop female employees by pairing Cisco executives with women across various business functions. My commitment to educating the upcoming generation of design leaders is not just a professional duty, but a personal passion.
Thinkers360: How do you see the future of work evolving over the next 3 to 5 years?
TI: The future of work will be defined by AI companions augmenting menial and repetitive tasks, a mounting increase in user trust and competency with AI tools, and a focus on purpose-built AI solutions, all driven by thoughtful design and real-time decision-making. Over the next few years, I believe most workers will experience AI companions embedded in their collaboration tools including meetings, messaging, devices and more. The AI integrations will solve what I call the “blank page problem” – by assisting in the initial stages of content creation, AI will allow employees to focus on refining and completing tasks rather than beginning from scratch for every project.
Currently, I’m witnessing a noticeable gap between the ambitious AI strategies of tech companies and the readiness of customers to deploy these solutions. While their intentions are good, tech companies need to address this need given only 14% of organizations worldwide are fully ready to integrate AI into their businesses, according to Cisco’s latest AI Readiness Index. At Webex, we’re addressing this gap by focusing on purpose-built AI that’s tailored to address specific customer needs and use cases, rather than developing general-purpose AI. This hyper-targeted approach ensures that our AI solutions are relevant and valuable to our customers’ users. Within the next 3-5 years, successful adoption of AI technology will hinge on meeting users’ needs and integrating AI seamlessly into workflows.
Thinkers360: How is collaboration tech such as Webex impacting the physical design of office spaces?
TI: The traditional concept of dedicated personal workspaces is fading, raising the question: Without a personalized desk setup, what’s the incentive for employees to work from the office? The office needs to offer experiences that are better than at home. With fewer people coming into the office, organizations have the challenging task of creating great culture when faced with distance. People are joining new teams that they’ve never met face-to-face. So, inclusive technologies across workloads – like Slido polling, pervasive whiteboarding, and AI-powered meetings – are so important to bring teams together.
At Webex, we designed our AI to help create an inclusive culture among distributed workforces. Things like removing background noise, ensuring high video quality even with low bandwidth, and real-time transcriptions and translations help bridge the gap between employees collaborating around the globe. The next game-changer is generative AI, which we use to summarize a meeting you missed, catch users up on all the action items from a series of meetings they may have missed, or generate a recap of the dialog in a collaboration space over time. There’s also a stacking effect here: if users have better video and audio quality, they get better conversions to text, which gives them more accurate translations and better results.
Thinkers360: What are you seeing as some of the current workplace design trends?
TI: The function of today’s modern office has changed significantly. Traditional office spaces were once the place where you went to work. Post-pandemic, employees are well-equipped to do heads-down work at home. So, the purpose of the office has changed – it becomes a place to meet and collaborate with your team. The result? Companies in almost every sector are reducing the percentage of personal working spaces and increasing collaborative spaces. So not only are conference rooms changing, but the whole office is changing.
In the last three years, Cisco has revamped its offices in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Paris to build workplace devices that, quietly supported by powerful AI, make it feel like you’re in the room with colleagues regardless of where they are in the world. Where we once had only 30% of our conference rooms video-enabled, now 100% of all workspaces, including conference rooms, huddle spaces, open ideation spaces, and more, all have the latest Cisco video technology to ensure that everyone has an exceptional experience.
We also flipped the ratio of individual workstations and huddle and hotdesking spaces—from 70% assigned spaces and desks to just 30%. This change increased the available spaces for employees to work, and within one year, tripled the number of employees coming into the office. These seemingly simple changes enabled our employees to collaborate more effectively and build community with their co-workers.
Editor’s Note: See Travis Isaacs’s Thinkers360 profile to contact him directly.
Thinkers360: Where’s the pendulum right now in terms of in-person, virtual and hybrid work?
TI: The pendulum of in-person, remote and hybrid work is still swinging, but companies that embrace a hybrid work model will not only attract the best talent but also foster creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. While we all understand the benefits of hybrid work, the question we hear often is, “How do we make hybrid work, work?”
We recently conducted a global study of about 14,050 full- time employees and 3,800 employers in a range of company sizes in 19 countries to learn more about the current state of hybrid work. The report reveals a surprising truth: employees feel positively about returning to the office, provided the spaces support seamless collaboration, social interaction, and creative brainstorming. While 72% of employees are positive about returning to the office, only 47% believe their work environments are equipped for this new era of hybrid work. It’s time to advocate for and design office spaces that truly support the ways employees want to work together.
Organizations need to modernize their workspaces to optimize them for effective hybrid meetings – everything from the devices to the space layouts, furniture, and even environmental controls. They need the infrastructure to provide the bandwidth and performance that hybrid meetings demand. And, everything needs to work together holistically, with IT having end-to-end visibility so they can ensure the best user experience for everyone and gain critical business insights.
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