Enabling Next-Generation Workplace Technologies
At its 25,000-square-foot Workplace Innovation Lab at headquarters, the General Services Administration is already showcasing the latest collaboration technologies that will soon be available to the DOD and national security agencies once air-gapped environments are established.
Conceived with Cisco in 2022 and the lab took four months to construct and sees about 300 to 400 federal IT practitioners touring weekly, says Scott Morin, federal account manager at Cisco.
Artificial intelligence will be a “prominent” part of the lab, which already incorporated machine learning technologies trained without the use of customer data, Patel says. New on-premises noise removal and noise cancellation technologies can filter out background noise from vacuums or lawn mowers to isolate human speech.
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AI can detect humans in a room and create individual video streams for them so employees joining remotely feel more included, and can routinely change camera angles to make meetings more engaging.
Conference rooms now track temperature, volatile compounds, humidity and number of people to improve the health and wellness of those spaces.
All of this is part of a larger effort to make the workplace a “magnet” that employees want to return to, now that agencies are requiring that, Patel says.
Cisco recognizes it’s not the only player in the collaboration tool space that’s going air-gapped, so it’s emphasizing interoperability with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet by moving some of that software to its hardware stack.
“Microsoft Teams gets better when you actually use it on Cisco devices because you can have noise removal and noise cancellation,” Patel says.
