The New Frontier of CX: How Cisco's Integrated AI Strategy will Deliver Unprecedented Customer Experience & Partner Value

Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Liz Centoni's vision for Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) organization is bold, future-ready, transformative, and complete. This vision is fundamentally reshaping how customers interact with and derive value from their technology investments. Cisco's CX strategy centers on leveraging Generative AI and Agentic AI to move beyond reactive support towards proactive, predictive, and personalized assistance throughout the entire customer lifecycle—from initial planning and deployment to ongoing operation and renewals.

Cisco is achieving this by digitizing decades of historical knowledge, establishing standardized workflows, and developing AI-powered tools, such as intelligent agents, delivered through unified platforms. These innovations provide actionable insights, tailored recommendations, and automated actions. The overarching goal is to revolutionize customer experience by simplifying operations, enhancing customer value, and accelerating time to value for both customers and partners, all while carefully maintaining the critical elements of human expertise and trust. I firmly believe that this forward-thinking strategy positions Cisco CX to enhance resilience and simplify complexity in an increasingly intricate technological landscape.

As an industry analyst at Techaisle, my analysis of Cisco's CX strategy reveals several critical insights. Here, I will delve into the competitive differentiation these developments offer Cisco, their tangible benefits for customers, and the fresh opportunities they unlock for channel partners:

1. An Integrated AI Strategy: Combining Traditional ML with Generative AI

Cisco's approach to leveraging AI within CX is not limited to the latest generative AI (Gen AI) models. Instead, it involves a sophisticated combination of traditional machine learning (ML) models, especially predictions, with the reasoning and conversational capabilities of Gen AI. While Gen AI is powerful, it operates probabilistically, unlike the deterministic nature of ML models used for predictions. Cisco has found that combining the determinism of ML models with the power of reasoning and conversational interfaces of Gen AI yields excellent results, especially in terms of accuracy. This hybrid approach is being scaled horizontally with Agentic AI, focusing on workflows while keeping human expertise and empathy in the loop.

• Competitive Differentiation: This integrated approach, leveraging the strengths of both traditional AI and Gen AI, provides a more accurate and reliable foundation for CX applications compared to relying solely on probabilistic Gen AI models, which can suffer from hallucinations. Cisco's long history with machine learning (ML) for predictions gives it a head start in this combined strategy.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers benefit from higher accuracy in predictions and recommendations, leading to more reliable services and insights. The deterministic nature of the ML component, especially for risk recommendations, ensures trust in the AI's guidance.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners can leverage these more accurate AI-powered tools and insights to provide better service to their customers. Understanding this hybrid AI approach can help partners articulate the value and reliability of Cisco's CX solutions.

2. The Agentic CX Lifecycle: AI Across the Customer Journey

Cisco views AI, particularly agentic AI, as applicable across the entire customer lifecycle, traditionally understood as plan, design, implement, migrate, operate, and optimize. The vision is to apply agentic AI to support, professional services and operations, moving away from siloed AI implementations. The lifecycle includes ongoing motions like operations and optimization, which can leverage real-time insights for proactive action, and on-demand motions like planning and design, which trigger models for improvement. Gathering intent early in the planning phase is crucial to tailor the subsequent stages effectively. AI is being applied to understand the desired state versus the actual state, identify deviations from best practices, and predict future variations in implemented environments.

• Competitive Differentiation: Applying agentic AI comprehensively across the entire customer lifecycle, powered by insights from cross-domain data, allows Cisco to offer a more integrated and continuously intelligent CX experience than point solutions. This differentiates Cisco from competitors who may focus solely on specific stages, such as support or operations.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers experience a more connected and intelligent journey from planning to renewal. AI-driven insights help them understand deviations, proactively identify potential issues (like security vulnerabilities or lack of adoption), and receive proactive and predictive recommendations across all phases. This moves CX from reactive "break-fix" to proactive & predictive prevention. Preventing incidents before they happen is significantly more valuable to customers than just fixing them faster.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners can engage customers at various points in their lifecycle with AI-augmented services. From using digitized planning tools to leveraging insights for optimizing implemented networks, partners can offer enhanced services powered by Cisco's CX AI. This standardizes and accelerates service delivery.

3. Proactive, Predictive, and Personalized CX: The Core Vision

The overarching vision for the future of CX is to make it proactive, predictive, and personalized. This is achieved by leveraging cross-domain data to drive insights, empower predictive models, and deliver practical recommendations and actions. AI is expected to process requests from users and tools, coordinating multiple agents (human and machine) working concurrently within workflows to deliver embedded outcomes. The shift is from reactive measures to anticipating and preventing issues. Hyper-personalization involves tailoring the CX journey, including adoption and support, to the customer's specific environment and needs.

• Competitive Differentiation: This vision, supported by a unified platform and extensive data, positions Cisco to deliver a level of personalized proactivity and predictability that surpasses traditional support models. The ability to provide insights and recommendations across multiple domains differentiates Cisco from vendors focused only on single product areas.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers benefit from services that can anticipate potential problems, such as performance bottlenecks or security risks, and guide them before issues impact their operations. They receive personalized recommendations, making them feel valued and unique, regardless of their size. This leads to increased resilience and reduces operational friction.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners can utilize predictive insights to provide proactive services, thereby enhancing their value proposition and fostering stronger customer trust. The ability to offer personalized guidance on adoption or risk mitigation allows partners to become trusted advisors.

4. Services as Code and Digital Delivery: Transforming Professional Services

A significant transformation is underway in professional services through the implementation of "Services-as-Code". This methodology aims to standardize, digitize, and automate the delivery of professional services, moving away from manual, document-based processes. Services-as-Code builds on the concept of infrastructure as code, ensuring an auditable source of truth for network configuration and enabling best practices like testing and validation before deployment. This involves providing digital artifacts, tracking them for security vulnerabilities, and offering a common automation framework (potentially a VM for customers without existing infrastructure) to manage Git pipelines. An AI assistant is layered on top of Services-as-Code, allowing users to interact with their network configuration through natural language, asking questions or requesting summaries.

• Competitive Differentiation: Standardizing professional services delivery through a Services-as-Code methodology, coupled with an AI assistant, provides a highly repeatable, auditable, and efficient approach that competitors may lack. This approach allows Cisco to scale its IP and expertise more effectively across deployments.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers benefit from faster, more reliable, and consistent network deployments and changes with reduced configuration errors. The AI assistant makes complex network configurations more accessible and understandable, empowering operational teams to work more efficiently. The methodology integrates testing and validation, increasing confidence in changes.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners can adopt the services-as-code methodology to standardize and accelerate their own service delivery, creating a differentiator. They can leverage the AI assistant to help their customers understand and manage their networks. This framework provides a structure for delivering value-added services around automation, testing, and configuration management.

5. AI-Powered Support and Security Assessment: Enhancing Operational Resilience

AI is profoundly impacting the support experience and critical areas, such as security hardening. Cisco has a widely used AI assistant for support with hundreds of thousands of users, accessible via a support assistant or embedded within products. This assistant leverages real-time data (sentiment, visibility, insights) to answer complex questions, analyze risks, and suggest actions. For security assessment and hardening, AI agents are being used to process extensive documentation (hardening guides, security vulnerabilities), breaking it down into actionable compliance checks tailored to a customer's specific environment. The system can diagnose issues, generate remediation scripts, and confirm fixes.

• Competitive Differentiation: Cisco's investment in a unified AI assistant across its support and product portfolios, combined with AI agents trained on vast amounts of technical and security documentation, enables it to offer highly personalized and efficient troubleshooting and security guidance. The ability to transform complex security documentation into actionable, automated checks tailored to a customer's environment is a significant differentiator.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers receive faster, more accurate support and troubleshooting assistance, reducing operational friction. The AI-driven security assessment helps them understand their real risks, ensures compliance with hardening guides, and provides automated remediation steps, dramatically improving their security posture and resilience.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners can leverage the AI support assistant and the security assessment tools to enhance their own support offerings and security services. They can utilize automated security assessments to identify customer risks and offer remediation services, thereby driving new business opportunities. Access to these tools helps partners reframe their support from reactive to proactive.

6. A Unified Customer Experience Platform: Single View, Multiple Access Points

Cisco CX is moving towards a unified SaaS presence and a unified on-premises presence to consolidate currently disconnected portals and fragmented insights. The goal is to bring together experiences across professional services and support services into a single, consistent view. This platform will provide various access points, including a unified user interface (UI), APIs, software development kits (SDKs), and integrations with systems such as ServiceNow. This unified view will provide customers and partners with visibility into their Cisco environment, including assets, contracts, cases, security risks, adoption status, and personalized recommendations.

• Competitive Differentiation: Consolidating diverse CX capabilities into a single, unified platform across SaaS and on-premises deployments, with flexible access points (UI, API), offers a significantly simplified and more coherent experience than competitors with fragmented tools. This platform approach is designed for scale and consistency.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers benefit from a simplified experience, as they can access all their relevant Cisco information and tools through a single interface or integrated workflows, thereby reducing operational overhead. They gain comprehensive visibility into their environment, enabling them to plan and manage more effectively.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners gain access to a single portal to manage multiple customers and access relevant insights and capabilities. Role-based access ensures they only see data for customers they manage. APIs allow partners to integrate Cisco CX insights and capabilities into their own platforms and workflows, creating customized offerings.

7. Human-in-the-Loop and Trust: The Unwavering Importance of Human Expertise

Despite its heavy reliance on AI, Cisco consistently emphasizes the critical role of human expertise and empathy in the customer experience (CX) model. The strategy is centered on humans and machines working together, not on replacing humans entirely. While AI can handle a vast majority of low-severity, repeatable issues, complex problems and situations requiring empathy and human judgment still necessitate human intervention. Building and maintaining customer trust, which has been earned over the past 40 years, is paramount. This trust is deeply tied to human relationships and reliable interactions.

• Competitive Differentiation: Cisco's explicit commitment to keeping humans in the loop, especially for complex issues and building customer relationships, differentiates it from approaches that might over-automate and alienate customers. This hybrid model leverages the efficiency of AI while preserving the trust and nuanced understanding that only humans can provide.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers feel valued knowing that complex or emotionally charged issues will be handled by human experts who understand their specific context and frustrations. The combination of efficient AI for routine tasks and human expertise for challenging situations ensures both speed and quality in support and services.
• New Opportunities for Partners: AI takes on routine, time-consuming tasks (such as initial case handling or sifting through documentation), freeing up partners' human experts to focus on higher-value activities, including complex problem-solving, strategic consulting, and building deeper customer relationships. This increases the capacity and profitability of partner teams.

8. Data Leverage and Knowledge Digitization: Fueling AI with Decades of Expertise

A foundational element of Cisco's CX AI strategy is the extensive use of its vast data reserves and the digitization of its intellectual capital. With 40+ years of data, including 1.6 million support tickets annually and knowledge from 2.4 million CCNA/CCIE certified professionals, Cisco possesses a unique training ground for its AI models. This includes both structured data, such as contracts and installed base information, and unstructured data, including technical documentation, case histories, and best practices. Digitizing and normalizing this knowledge base enables powerful peer benchmarking, deviation analysis, and predictive modeling.

• Competitive Differentiation: Cisco's immense volume and breadth of proprietary, high-quality enterprise data, spanning networking, security, support interactions, and certified expertise, provides a unique and powerful training resource for its AI models that competitors cannot easily replicate. This data enables more accurate predictions, insights, and best-practice recommendations.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers benefit from AI models trained on real-world data and best practices from thousands of implementations and support cases. This translates into more relevant peer benchmarks, better predictions of potential issues, and highly validated recommendations based on extensive experience.
• New Opportunities for Partners: Partners gain access to AI-powered insights and recommendations derived from this vast data pool. They can leverage these insights, such as adoption best practices based on peer data or predictive risk assessments, to provide more informed and effective guidance to their customers.

9. Partner Enablement: Bringing the Ecosystem Along

Cisco is committed to enabling its partners and bringing them along on this CX AI journey. The intention is to provide partners with access to the same core digital capabilities, tools (such as adoption agents and renewal assistants), insights, and methodologies (like Services-as-Code) that Cisco's internal teams utilize. This standardization ensures a common experience and helps partners drive value for customers in alignment with Cisco's strategy. Partner profitability is seen as sustainable through innovation, proactive services, driving adoption, and leveraging AI to create capacity. Efforts include working through the mechanics of sharing AI-covered insights securely and providing APIs for partners to integrate capabilities into their own interfaces.

• Competitive Differentiation: By enabling partners with advanced AI and digital CX tools, Cisco extends its reach and strengthens its ecosystem's ability to deliver value. The widespread adoption of standardized, AI-enhanced methodologies across Cisco's partner base creates a powerful force multiplier for its customer experience (CX) strategy.
• Positive Impact on Customers: Customers working with enabled partners receive the same high-quality, proactive, predictive, and personalized CX as those working directly with Cisco, ensuring consistency and leveraging the partner's local expertise and relationships.
• New Opportunities for Partners: This is a direct opportunity for partners to modernize their service offerings, enhance profitability, and differentiate themselves in the market. Adopting Services-as-Code, utilizing AI-powered insights for proactive support and adoption, and integrating Cisco's CX capabilities via APIs enables partners to offer more sophisticated and efficient services, advance up the value chain, and secure recurring revenue through renewals driven by adoption. Cisco is encouraging partners to shift from project-based, reactive support to subscription-based, proactive engagement.

Conclusion

Cisco CX represents a comprehensive, AI-driven transformation designed to fundamentally change how Cisco, its customers, and partners interact with each other. By strategically combining traditional AI with Gen AI, applying agentic AI across the entire lifecycle, focusing on proactive and personalized engagement, standardizing delivery with Services-as-Code, enhancing support and security with AI, building a unified platform, prioritizing the human touch, and leveraging its unique data assets, Cisco is building a decisive competitive advantage. The commitment to bringing partners along this journey through enablement and shared capabilities highlights the ecosystem's critical role in delivering this next generation of Customer Experience. The vision is bold, and execution is ongoing, with a clear focus on delivering measurable outcomes that simplify operations, increase resilience, and accelerate the value customers gain from their Cisco investments.