Cisco: The AI Chatbot Era Is Dead – Here's What Comes Next

At Cisco Live 2026, Cisco pulled back the curtain on a suite of AI-native tools designed to help organizations orchestrate, secure, and manage a blended workforce of human and AI agents.To get the inside track, CX Today’s Rhys Fisher sat down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, for a wide-ranging conversation on what the shift to AI-native CX actually demands in practice.Muthukrishnan is clear that the industry has moved past the experimentation phase, and that the bar for what comes next is significantly higher than most vendors are letting on:“It’s never been easier to build an AI agent. It’s, however, never been harder to make it enterprise grade. And that’s the dichotomy we’ve got to deal with.”The conversation covers a lot of ground. Muthukrishnan pushes back on the industry’s fixation with deflection and containment rates, arguing that no single metric can capture the full customer journey.He walks through Cisco’s AI Agent 360, a framework combining custom guardrailing, runtime monitoring, and Splunk-powered observability, and makes the case that security and observability are foundational requirements for any serious agentic deployment, not optional extras bolted on afterward.He also introduces the concept of “one experience”: the idea that regardless of channel, timing, or how many agents were involved, every customer interaction should feel like a continuation of the last.Looking further ahead, Muthukrishnan raises a question that will resonate with anyone thinking seriously about where this technology leads. If agentic AI can cut across every organizational silo, does the enterprise as we know it still make sense?