The People Insights profiles are made up from two primary categories of data: 1) Public data gathered from across the web; and 2) Corporate directory data (i.e. Active Directory).
In May 2018, Cisco acquired a startup called Accompany, an artificial intelligence company that built a proprietary data platform of more than 270 million people profiles and more than 20 million company profiles. This data constitutes the public element of the People Insights people profiles. The Accompany public data is gathered by crawling billions of pages across the web, discovering pages containing professional information, and applying artificial intelligence algorithms to extract, label, and structure that data. All such collected data is run through a clustering process to determine which data points belong together as part of the same person’s profile. For example, if there are 10,000 pieces of data labeled ‘John Smith’ we seek to determine which groups of data points belong together to create one “John Smith, the accountant” as distinct from a different John Smith — “John Smith, the engineer.” Clustered data points are constantly combined, handling any conflicting information, to create our end result—a rich personal and professional overview combining disparate data sources from across the web.
It is important to note that all webpages used in this way are fully publicly available. No LinkedIn data or any data that sits behind security barriers such as logins or paywalls is used in collating the public data, unless a user has explicitly logged in to a third-party integration to provide such access (i.e., Twitter).
When users interact with the People Insights feature, we also initiate a targeted discovery process to specifically enrich their profile and ensure we have discovered and ingested the most up-to-date public sources of data for that user.
Customers have the option to sync their corporate directory data to enrich their People Insights profiles. If they elect to do so, then Cisco will integrate with the customer’s directory, combine it with the public data, and present an enriched profile. As noted earlier, if enabled, this functionality allows participants to see internal titles, internal contact information, and reporting structures only for colleagues at their own organization. If a meeting has external participants, they cannot access corporate data. In that case, they will only see publicly available information, and only if the participants have made their profiles available.