Cisco Touts AI Success, But Customer Outcomes Remain Elusive

Cisco has successfully resolved over 145,000 support cases using its Agentic AI technology, with no human intervention required. According to Chuck Robbins, Chair and CEO at Cisco, this is a significant milestone in their efforts to improve customer experience through the use of generative and agentic AI.

In Q4, Cisco has been testing the limits of Agentic AI by using its CX operation as a proving ground for autonomous support tasks. The results show that AI can manage parts of the journey without requiring an employee to oversee every interaction, ensuring faster response times, quicker support resolutions, and stronger retention.

Cisco's proprietary AI assistant, Circuit, is fully embedded across its operations and runs on its secure AI infrastructure, which improves GPU utilization and automatically routes each task to the appropriate large language model. However, Cisco's figures primarily measure AI operational efficiency instead of customer outcomes, highlighting a key challenge for CX leaders.

Cisco's AI success has also led to increased demand for its security products, with over 1,500 customers buying new security products in Q4 and taking the number of net-new customers since launch above 6,400. However, Cisco's infrastructure costs are amongst top concerns for its customers and analysts, with recent networking price increases contributing around five percentage points to Q4 revenue growth.