A customer calling a support line doesn’t think about org charts. They don’t know or care whether they’ve reached the storefront, the billing department or the contact center, since to them it’s all just one continuous relationship with a brand. Most companies can’t deliver on that assumption today because their systems don’t share context across touchpoints, which is why some vendors are pushing to turn the traditional contact center into what they call a context center, a hub that carries a customer’s history with it everywhere they go.
Vinod Muthukrishnan (pictured), vice president and general manager of Webex customer experience at Cisco Systems Inc., has spent the past several months building out that vision under a broader banner Cisco calls agentic CX. The industry has overused the word agentic, since a bot that completes a single transaction doesn’t really qualify on its own, Muthukrishnan said.
“An AI agent that can fill a slot or fulfill a transaction is not agentic. Agentic is much more of a framework of tools and products and processes,” Muthukrishnan said. “The big thing around agentic is going away from just voice agents that can answer a question, fulfill a transaction, to orchestrating a journey, to now evolving all the way to be able to orchestrate a relationship.”
Muthukrishnan spoke with theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte and ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala at “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what separates a context center from a traditional contact center and how Cisco is building observability and security into every AI agent it ships. (* Disclosure below.)
Why a ‘context center’ needs machine-scale observability and security
That relationship-first approach only works if it’s safe at scale, since a system handling entire customer relationships autonomously has far more room to go wrong than one built to answer a single question, Muthukrishnan explained. Cisco’s answer is AI Agent 360, which folds observability, security and agent management into one control plane rather than treating them as separate products from separate vendors.
“It’s never been easier to build an AI agent. It’s never been harder to make it enterprise-grade,” Muthukrishnan said. “There’s a line we often use. We say autonomy without accountability is a liability.”
That philosophy carries into what Muthukrishnan calls the intelligent front door, the AI Concierge Cisco is building to carry a customer’s context across every channel and handoff. He traced the goal to a line one of Cisco’s customers used during a recent workshop.
“They said there is no wrong door,” Muthukrishnan said. “No matter which touchpoint, what channel, where in the enterprise you knock, the door opens and miraculously it’s almost the same person on the other side. The context is continuous, and you’re picking up the conversation from where it left off.”
Cisco is pairing that vision with a push for openness across the industry, supporting standards such as Agent2Agent and the Model Context Protocol so Webex agents can work alongside third-party systems rather than locking customers into a single stack. Cisco would rather be the platform enterprises build on than the one product they’re stuck with, Muthukrishnan added.
“Savings, or what have you, is the entry point, not the exit point,” he said. “Have a very ambitious North Star, but build a framework where you’ve understood the risk, the mitigation of the risk and the governance of the platform before you try to scale it.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit”:
(* Disclosure: Cisco sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
