Cisco generative AI strategy hinges on CX and agents

The contact center world is a difficult place, packed with frustration and stress.

Digital communications giant Cisco sees its mission as easing that experience for human contact center workers and the customers they deal with every day.

For that undertaking, the vendor has seized on generative AI and agentic AI as the vehicles to both automate and augment the work of humans -- in essence, smartening up the traditional chatbots that have long helped companies interact with their customers.

"We're to see a lot more of what I call event-based communication, proactive communication outbound that we do particularly well, powered by AI," said Jay Patel, senior vice president and general manager for customer experience at Cisco Webex, on the Targeting AI podcast from Informa TechTarget. "And then the response path to that is we think there will be AI agents involved in some of the more simple use cases.

"For example, if you haven't paid a bill, they can obviously call you in the outbound call center, but probably a better way of doing it is probably to send you a message with a link to then basically make the payment," Patel continued.

Like many other big tech vendors, Cisco deploys large language models from a variety of specialist vendors, including OpenAI and Microsoft. It also uses open models from independent generative AI vendor Mistral, as well as its own AI technology developed in-house or acquired by acquisition.

"Fundamentally, what we are looking at is the idea of an AI engine for each use case, and within the AI engine you would have a particular LLM," Patel said.

Among the generative AI-powered tools Cisco has assembled are Webex AI Assistant and Agent Wellness, to tend to the psyches of busy contact center human workers.

"Customers call very frustrated; they may shout at somebody. And then if you've had a difficult call, the Agent Wellness feature will mean that the supervisor knows that this set of agents has had a set of difficult calls," Patel said. "Maybe they're the ones who need a break now. So, there are ways of improving employee experience inside the contact center that we think we can ... use AI for."

Shaun Sutner is senior news director for Informa TechTarget's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. He is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of news experience. Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems. Together, they host the Targeting AI podcast.