Snorre Kjesbu has been thinking seriously about collaboration tools for a long time, but at Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas, the SVP and GM of Cisco Collaboration wasn’t talking about bandwidth or agent orchestration. He was talking about an axe.
“When you lift an axe,” he said, “it communicates clearly what it can do. If it’s designed right, it will be just right in your hand to cut that piece of wood.” The axe is Kjesbu’s entry point into a design philosophy that governs everything from the weight of a Cisco IP phone to the question of how AI reshapes work for people who don’t have consistent electricity.
These don’t sound like they belong in the same conversation. They do, and the fact that they do tells you something worth paying attention to.
At a conference dominated by platform announcements, keynote theatrics, and the word “agentic” appearing roughly every ninety seconds, Kjesbu’s conversation was harder to categorise. He wasn’t selling a product. He was articulating a position on what technology is for, which is rarer at these events than you’d expect.
His central idea is something Cisco calls “Distance Zero“: the proposition that collaboration technology should eliminate the perceptual gap between people in a meeting, regardless of where they physically are. Not just clear video, but the ability to read a facial expression from the corner of your eye. The passive dialogue. The glance you give someone when a conversation starts drifting. Kjesbu argues this is how human beings actually communicate, and that most enterprise collaboration tools have spent twenty years optimising for the wrong things.
“What is the prerequisite of that?” he asked. “One is to be able to see my gestures, my mimic, my eyes.” The Cisco Desk Pro G2 and Room Kit Pro G2, both announced earlier this year, are the hardware expression of this idea: dual-lens 4K cameras, spatial audio, AI-powered framing that treats the peripheral gaze as part of the conversation rather than a technical failure to be cropped out.
There’s an obvious question here, which is whether this constitutes meaningful differentiation or whether it’s a premium repackaging of improvements that were already happening across the industry. Microsoft Teams Rooms has iterated heavily on camera intelligence. Zoom has invested significantly in what it calls “smart gallery” framing. The category is not short of ambition.
What Kjesbu adds is a design lens that cuts across the hardware and raises a different set of questions. Cisco’s IP phones, he notes, have a design lineage stretching back decades. The standardised icon for an IP phone globally is the Cisco IP4 silhouette. The company still produces a phone series it launched in 2012. He calls this the Porsche 911 principle: the shape communicates itself across generations, and that communicative clarity is itself a form of quality.
Whether you find this compelling or indulgent probably depends on how much you think product longevity is a design virtue versus a marketing position. But the sustainability argument underneath it is harder to dismiss. The Codec Pro G2, which Cisco launched at Cisco Live, reduced its material usage by 40% by eliminating every component that didn’t serve a structural or functional purpose. That’s not a minor improvement. At a time when enterprise hardware is treated as a roughly three-year refresh cycle, designing for the decade is a meaningful counter-proposal, both for procurement costs and for the very real environmental load of continuous hardware replacement.
The harder part of the conversation came when we moved from design to displacement.
South Africa’s relationship with AI is shaped by anxieties that are both specific and widely shared. BPO is a major employer, digital infrastructure access is uneven, and the question of whether agentic AI accelerates or compounds existing labour inequality is one that doesn’t have a clean answer. Kjesbu’s position on this is considered, and more honest about the uncertainty than the conference floor generally permits.
His framing is historical: “There’s a lot of meaningless jobs that have been lost over the years. There are a lot of jobs that were interesting some years back, they were lost. And there are a lot of new jobs that have popped up.” He doesn’t claim this is comfortable, but he does argue that the pattern holds. The bottleneck shifts. The question is whether the new work is accessible to the people whose old work disappeared.
On structural instability specifically, he argues that collaboration technology is itself a partial democratisation of opportunity. If you can’t get to work because of infrastructure failure, or because you’re a carer, or because you’re in a region without reliable transport, then good remote collaboration tools expand the labour market geography for you. The tools Cisco has built to reduce bandwidth requirements for video, he says, were developed specifically with variable connectivity in mind.
This is a real claim, and it has a meaningful South African dimension. The compression of collaboration quality down to lower bandwidths matters in a context where fibre penetration is clustered in urban centres and 5G coverage remains aspirational in large parts of the country. If Distance Zero requires the kind of high-fidelity symmetric connection that’s reliably available in Sandton but not in large swathes of Limpopo or the Eastern Cape, then it’s a premium feature, not a democratising one. Kjesbu doesn’t pretend otherwise. But he does argue the direction of travel is toward lower bandwidth thresholds, not higher ones, and that the product decisions reflect this.
What Cisco Live makes legible, and what this conversation crystallises, is that the company is navigating a tension it doesn’t always name directly: between the high-end collaboration hardware it designs for enterprise boardrooms and the broader claim that its technology serves everyone. The Desk Pro G2 is priced at around $6,000. That’s not a tool you deploy to a 50-person call centre in Cape Town to keep jobs from being automated. It’s a device for the people whose jobs aren’t going anywhere.
This tension doesn’t invalidate the design philosophy. Kjesbu is articulate and evidently genuine in his conviction that good design serves both sustainability and user dignity. The “Scandinavian minimalism meets California approachability” framing he describes, which the team apparently calls “Scandifornia” internally, is a coherent aesthetic position rather than a marketing exercise. The Porsche 911 comparison is actually instructive: those cars are excellent and also expensive and available to a fairly specific slice of the population.
The more interesting question isn’t whether the design philosophy is sincere. It clearly is. The question is whether Cisco’s collaboration division, as agentic AI reshapes the operational layer of enterprise IT, can hold the space it currently occupies. Collaboration revenue at Cisco was flat in the most recent quarter, down slightly year on year, while networking revenue grew 25%. The company is winning on infrastructure. On the tools people use to actually work together, the competitive dynamics are harder. Microsoft has bundled Teams into enterprise licensing in ways that make the choice question different from what it was five years ago. Zoom has matured into a platform with its own device ecosystem. Google Meet has improved substantially.
Cisco’s answer is that the integration story, the ability to fold collaboration into the AgenticOps operating model alongside networking, security and observability, changes the frame. Cloud Control, announced at Cisco Live 2026, places Webex inside a unified management plane. The idea is that collaboration tools managed in isolation from the rest of the enterprise stack are increasingly an anachronism. When an AI agent can diagnose why a video room isn’t connecting in the same interface where it’s managing firewall rules and network performance, the product stops being a video conferencing system and starts being infrastructure.
Whether that framing lands with buyers is the actual test.
Kjesbu ended the conversation with something that caught me off guard, partly because it broke from the conversational register of the rest of the session. He talked about the people he’s met across his career, the talent from every part of the world that he had no idea he’d encounter when he was a student in Norway, and what it’s meant to him to build things together with them. The biggest gift of his professional life, he said.
It’s the kind of statement that usually signals a conversation wrapping up in a rehearsed way. But it didn’t feel rehearsed. It felt like someone who has spent a long time thinking about what collaboration is actually for, arriving at the honest answer: proximity, recognition, the specific quality of attention you give and receive when the technology disappears and you’re just with another person.
That’s a demanding standard for a product category to meet. It’s also the right one.
There was a question I didn’t ask, and it only came to me later.
Distance Zero is a spatial argument. If the technology can recreate the perceptual conditions of shared presence, the peripheral read of body language, the glance across a table, the facial expression registered without being the subject of it, then distance becomes functionally irrelevant. Kjesbu makes this case with genuine conviction, and the hardware Cisco has built around it is a serious attempt to close the gap.
But the gap Distance Zero is trying to close is not the only gap that matters.
The reason informal connection works in physical space isn’t that it’s high-fidelity. It’s that it’s unscheduled and carries no agenda. The catching-up that happens before a meeting properly starts, the hallway conversation, the coffee overlap, these don’t occur inside a tool you’ve opened with intent. Webex, like every platform competing in this category, is something you launch in order to do something. That intentionality doesn’t just frame the interaction, it shapes the social register of everything inside it. However well the cameras perform, the chit-chat at the start of a call is always slightly different from the same exchange in a corridor, because both people know the agenda is one click away.
This isn’t a criticism of Kjesbu’s design philosophy, which is honest about what it’s trying to solve. And it’s worth noting that Cisco’s own framing of hybrid work has quietly shifted from “remote is equivalent” to something more nuanced: use physical presence for what requires it, and use tools like ours for the rest. That’s a more defensible position. It’s also a tacit acknowledgement that Distance Zero closes the gap on structured collaboration without fully closing it on the ambient social texture that builds relationships over time.
The question of what technology can and can’t replicate about human connection is older than enterprise software, and it won’t be settled by a better camera. But it’s the question underneath every conversation about the future of work, and it deserves to stay in the room, even when the room is a Webex call.