After years of cooperation in the data center market, IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. are extending their partnership to enterprise collaboration. The vendors today announced plans to link their respective communications products with one another and add artificial intelligence functionality from Watson into the mix to automate certain tasks.

Ed Brill, the head of Big Blue’s collaboration business, told TechCrunch that the initial integration is expected to complete by the end of the year. The effort will see the IBM Verse email client plugged into Cisco’s WebEx videoconferencing service and Spark messaging platform to streamline file sharing, which is good news for a lot of users. Salespeople, for instance, will gain the ability to send marketing material more easily during calls with prospects. And workers will also be able to share content with colleagues thanks to a connector for the IBM Connections corporate social network that is set to roll out in conjunction.

Brill expects the first artifical intelligence services to follow suit in 2017. He didn’t provide any specifics, but IBM’s official partnership announcement mentions “real-time advice and handling tasks” as two of the use cases on the agenda. This strongly suggests that the functionality will be delivered in the form of chatbots like the kind available on Slack. Spark and WebEx might even receive support for third party applications created using Dialog, an automated response engine based on Watson that Big Blue launched last year. Such an integration could make the services much more appealing to large organizations that require custom functionality tailored to their specific needs.

If the Watson integration lives up to its potential, then IBM and Cisco could become a force to be reckoned in the collaboration market. But the competition won’t leave their effort unanswered. In fact, Microsoft Corp. is already hard at work building artificial intelligence functionality for Skype. The company unveiled a Cortana-based chatbot at its Build event in March that can book flights, organize users’ calendars and even look up information on the web upon request. Meanwhile, Slack is encouraging its partners to create similar features through a $80 million chatbot fund that is supported by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms.

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