Cisco has announced the findings of its latest global research report, “The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience,” highlighting the potential of agentic AI to revolutionize the way technology vendors deliver services and support to customers.
In the survey of 7,950 global business and technical decision-makers across 30 countries, respondents predict that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in their interactions with technology vendors over the coming years and are positive about the benefits it will bring. 88% report they feel confident that the agentic AI-led customer experience provided by technology partners will help their organization achieve its goals – for example, making their IT environments and operations more efficient, resilient and secure, accelerating their most important strategic IT projects, and maximizing value from their IT investments.
Respondents also expect the pivot to agentic AI-led customer experience (including technical support, customer success and professional services) to advance at a far greater velocity than the industry anticipated. They predict that 68% of their customer experience interactions with technology partners will be handled using agentic AI within the next three years. And, surprisingly, they expect more than half (56%) of interactions to be through agentic AI within the next 12 months, representing a significant increase and heaping pressure onto those vendors who are still only in the early stages of thinking about agentic.
Liz Centoni, EVP & Chief Customer Experience Officer, Cisco, commented: “With agentic AI reaching a new level of maturity, we’re closer than ever to solving some of the most persistent customer pain points in enterprise environments. For instance, a significant share of network issues stem from misconfiguration, something agentic systems are poised to eliminate. That shift will lead to smarter networks, stronger security, and more productive teams. As an industry, we’ve been talking about these concepts for decades, and while we’ve made incremental progress, AI – and especially agentic AI – is making that vision a reality.
“We are drawing on four decades of data, our deep industry knowledge, and the trust of our customers to re-imagine Cisco Customer Experience as an agentic-led function. Our vision is to make every customer interaction with Cisco personalized, proactive, and predictive, and to make every customer feel like they are our only customer. And while we’re making meaningful progress, this new research makes one thing clear: we have to move faster.”
In recent years, in response to growing IT complexity, technology businesses have introduced automation into their workflows and layered in AI to streamline support and services. This approach has still required human intervention to stitch processes together – to monitor, decide, act and adapt. Agentic AI negates the need for this level of human intervention. Agentic AI is a category of artificial intelligence that leverages AI Agents and a contextualized interconnection among them. Agentic AI requires agency, meaning the AI Agents are capable of having memory, are task aware and possess the ability to independently take actions – or choose what actions to take or recommend – to achieve a particular outcome through the ability to learn from their environment and reason, with minimal human oversight.
This frees up customer experience professionals to focus on complex problem-solving, humans-on-the-loop feedback process for specific use-cases (where humans, for example, provide feedback to an AI system to improve its performance and focus on accurate and safe results), and building deeper, trusted relationships with customers.
The research highlights the urgent need for technology vendors, many of whom are still only exploring the potential for agentic AI deployment within customer experience, to accelerate their strategies.
Respondents are clear that they believe vendors who are left behind or fail to deploy agentic AI in an effective, secure and ethical manner, will suffer a deterioration in customer relationships, reputational damage and higher levels of customer churn.
Meanwhile, the research highlights that respondents feel that vendors who embrace this transformation head-on, seamlessly and ethically deploying agentic AI across the technology lifecycle, will benefit from data-driven insights, improved scalability within their support and services, and loyalty at scale. Customer experience will become a strategic differentiator, with 81% of respondents predicting that vendors that successfully deliver agentic AI-led customer experience will gain a competitive edge.
Key Findings
- Accelerated demand for customer experience: As levels of IT complexity increase, organizations are leaning on technology vendors more than ever before. 92% of respondents state that the support and services provided by vendors are becoming more critical in the AI era.
- Use cases across the technology lifecycle: more than 80% of respondents point to potential benefits of agentic AI-led customer experience at every stage of the technology lifecycle, with customer and technical support, technology strategy and planning, and operations viewed as the greatest opportunities.
- Game-changing benefits: customers expect agentic AI to drive improvements in IT productivity, time savings, and cost savings, as well as opportunities to improve data analytics, troubleshooting, and alignment of technology investment with digital transformation goals.
- Human connection is irreplaceable: customers want to retain human interaction when engaging with support and services, with 96% stating that human relationships are very important when interacting with B2B technology partners.
- Robust governance is non-negotiable: 99% of respondents state that it’s important for technology partners to demonstrate robust governance arrangements to deliver ethical use of agentic AI, and 81% feel that vendors need to share their vision for AI-led customer experience to bring customers along on the journey.
