Distance Zero: How Cisco Is Rewriting Hybrid Collaboration (and Why It Matters Now)
If you’ve ever joined a hybrid meeting and felt “less there” than the people in the room, you’ve experienced the gap Cisco wants to erase. In my conversation with Snorre Kjesbu, SVP & GM for Cisco’s Collaboration—Employee Experiences, we dug into Distance Zero: Cisco’s vision for meetings where every participant has an equal seat at the table—seen, heard, and included in the room’s dynamics—no matter where they are.
This isn’t about shiny features for their own sake. It’s a design philosophy: technology should become invisible so humans can focus on the work—ideas, decisions, relationships.
Below is what Distance Zero really means, what’s new under the hood, and a practical playbook you can use to bring true meeting equity to your teams.
What “Distance Zero” Actually Means
“The ultimate goal is that the technology should be invisible. We should go about our discussions as if technology didn’t exist.”
Cisco defines Distance Zero as meeting equity in practice. That’s more than clean audio and a decent camera angle. It’s:
Being seen at eye height and in the right size—so you’re not a postage stamp next to a boardroom of full-size faces.
Being heard with clarity—your voice prioritized, background noise suppressed.
Reading the room even when you’re remote—understanding who’s speaking, where the conversation is heading, and who’s influencing a decision.
The subtle but crucial bit: equalizing presence. Cisco’s systems work to keep participants at consistent eye height and relative size—a seemingly small change that removes visual hierarchies and makes it easier to interpret social cues. If you’ve ever felt minimized by a bad conference-room camera, you know why this matters.
Why Now: A Decade of Edge AI Meets Today’s LLMs
“We’ve had AI at the edge for a decade… Now we’re bringing it together with large-language models.”
Distance Zero isn’t a bolt-from-the-blue feature. It’s the convergence of two tracks of work:
Edge AI maturity
Cisco’s been training models for years to:
Recognize and track faces and voices
Suppress specific noises (lawnmowers, dogs—yes, even different breeds behave differently to the model)
Optimize for a target speaker (e.g., “your boss”) so that the mic mix prioritizes who matters in the moment
Drive “cinematic” framing, which behaves like an AI television producer—tracking speakers, anticipating turns, and reframing as the conversation shifts.
LLMs on top of collaboration workflows
Layer large-language models onto that foundation and you unlock:
Live notes, summaries, and translations
Action extraction and follow-ups
Late-join catch-up (“Here’s what you missed…”) so people rejoin the flow without derailing it
Kjesbu said adoption data is strong: features like cinematic framing are now on by default (they removed the toggle after customers kept it enabled), and LLM-powered features—summaries, actions, translation—are growing fast.
Meeting Spaces Must “Earn the Commute”
“If we’re going to commute in, the office must earn the commute.”
Hybrid doesn’t mean “everything should be remote.” It means being deliberate:
Gather in-person for creativity, mentoring, culture, and complex decision-making.
Work anywhere for focused “grind” tasks that don’t need the room.
If you’re going to bring people in, rooms must outperform home setups—for people in the room and the folks joining remotely. That means better acoustics, displays, cameras (including side-wall perspectives), and tools designed for Distance Zero. And yes, don’t forget the “coffee line effect”: informal collision spaces still spark serendipity and momentum.
Accessibility Is a Core Requirement, Not a Nice-to-Have
“Translation, captions, and annotation lower barriers so everyone can fully immerse in what’s happening.”
Cisco bakes in accessibility features that help a wide range of users:
Live translation and captioning (helpful for multilingual teams and those with hearing differences, or even strong accents)
Annotation tools that pair visual and textual cues
Acoustic design that reduces in-ear pressure and fatigue for longer sessions
When accessibility is the default, everyone benefits—comprehension rises, friction falls, and inclusion becomes the norm rather than an exception.
IT and Facilities Get “Superpowers” Too
Collaboration is mission-critical now. If meetings fail, work stops. Cisco’s approach treats IT and facilities as first-class users by giving them:
Fleet-level manageability and observability powered by AI
Proactive health monitoring and configuration guidance
Backward compatibility “to the extent possible,” with heavier processing offloaded to the cloud where it makes sense
The takeaway: Distance Zero isn’t just end-user magic; it’s operational resilience.
Objects Belong in the Meeting, Too (Hello, 3D)
“You can discuss live 3D objects—fabric, texture, edges—without thinking about the tech.”
A compelling frontier Kjesbu highlighted: 3D object collaboration. With Apple Vision Pro and Cisco video devices, teams can hold, rotate, and examine physical products as if everyone were standing around the same prototype. For design, quality control, and packaging reviews, this is a serious time-to-decision accelerator.
Reality Check: Can You Use It with What You Have?
Short answer: often, yes. Capability depends on the horsepower of your existing devices. Cisco aims for backward compatibility where practical, and pushes heavy workloads to the cloud to expand what older rooms can do. If your setup is ancient, you’ll get more by upgrading endpoints—but you may be surprised how much your current rooms can gain just by turning on (or enabling) modern software features.
The Distance Zero Playbook: 10 Practical Moves
Want to pilot Distance Zero principles without tearing out your rooms? Start here.
Turn on “cinematic” framing and measure satisfaction (short post-meeting pulse).
Standardize eye-height, equal-size layouts in your default meeting views.
Default to live transcription + action capture for every meeting. Share summaries automatically.
Pilot live translation for cross-regional teams; gather comprehension feedback.
Tune noise suppression to your environment (keyboards, HVAC, open office spill).
Upgrade microphones before cameras if budget is tight; intelligibility beats pixels.
Add a side-wall camera to large rooms to improve front-facing presence.
Design the “coffee line”: create informal collaboration zones near key rooms.
Instrument your rooms: baseline utilization, join failures, audio complaints, and fix the worst 10%.
Run a 60-day pilot with a cross-functional group; publish what improved and what still needs work.
Questions to Ask Your Team (and Vendors)
Presence: Can remote participants appear at consistent eye height and similar size to in-room attendees?
Audio equity: Can we prioritize the right voice when multiple people talk? How well do we handle non-speech noises?
Comprehension: Are live summaries, captions, and translations accurate enough to trust?
Operations: What’s our visibility into room health and user experience? Can we fix problems before meetings start?
Compatibility: What do we gain today with our existing hardware if we move more logic to the cloud?
3D workflows: Do we have a use case where discussing physical objects in real time would accelerate work?
Why This Moment Matters
We’ve had phases: move to cloud, then to mobile. Kjesbu calls AI the biggest transition yet. The difference now is that the tech isn’t just “smart”—it’s coordinated. Camera framing, voice isolation, summaries, and translations work together to lower the cognitive tax of hybrid meetings. When people don’t fight the tools, ideas win.
“We meet people at eye height—same size, same presence, same seat at the table.”
That’s the bar. And it isn’t aspirational anymore—it’s shippable.
Final Take
Distance Zero is a useful north star for any collaboration stack, not just Cisco’s. Measure everything you do against one question: does this increase equity, clarity, and momentum for everyone in the meeting? If it doesn’t, fix it—or remove it.
If you lead teams, the most impactful thing you can do this quarter might be surprisingly simple: turn on the features you already have, instrument the experience, and iterate toward zero distance.
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