Transforming Collaboration Through Artificial Intelligence with Cisco’s Acquisition of MindMeld

Artificial Intelligence represents a tremendous opportunity to expand the reach and enhance the capabilities of enterprise technology. At Cisco, we have already been introducing AI into our solutions across security, orchestration, application performance and collaboration. Today, I’m excited to share Cisco’s intent to acquire MindMeld Inc., a San Francisco-based company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). This acquisition, Cisco’s third in two weeks, represents how the buy pillar of our innovation strategy continues to impact our strategic shift to become more of a software company.

Since 2011, MindMeld has focused on building intelligent conversational interfaces for companies to interact with their customers across almost any device or application. They have become an industry leader in AI, providing natural language interfaces for such use cases as shopping online, ordering products or contacting customer support.  At the core of MindMeld’s technology is a powerful machine learning platform that is able to ingest customer data and create a highly accurate and customized natural language model, tailored to each company’s industry and requirements. MindMeld also delivers a dialog manager that enables a computer to respond to user requests through chat and voice applications in a human-like fashion.

With MindMeld, we will enhance our Collaboration suite, adding new conversational interfaces to our collaboration products starting with Cisco Spark. I’m excited for the potential represented by the MindMeld team and their technology, coupled with Cisco’s market-leading collaboration portfolio, to enable us to create a user experience that is unlike anything that exists in the market today. Together, we will work to create the next generation collaboration experience. The MindMeld team will form the Cognitive Collaboration team and report into the IoT and Applications group under Jens Meggers, senior vice president and general manager. To learn more, check out Rowan’s blog on MindMeld.

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