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

Cisco's VP of Webex CX discusses orchestrating AI-native contact centers, why “deflection” is the wrong metric, and what enterprise-grade really means in the age of agentic AI -In this CX Today interview, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, ahead of Cisco Live. With a wave of major product announcements on the horizon, Vinod makes a compelling case that the contact center industry has reached a genuine inflection point; not just another AI upgrade cycle, but a ground-up reimagining of how humans, AI agents, and customers interact. If you're navigating AI adoption in CX, this one is worth your full attention. -The ‘AI experiment’ phase is over. Muthukrishnan argues that organizations have had enough time to tinker – and now the real work begins: making AI agents enterprise-grade, secure, and observable at scale. Here's what he unpacks: Why ‘deflection’ is the wrong word, and the wrong goal: Vinod challenges the industry's obsession with point-in-time metrics, making the case that CX is a journey, not a transaction. Real success means CSAT that's neutral or better, resolution in the shortest time, and a customer who doesn't immediately ask for a human. The trust gap in agentic AI: It's never been easier to build an AI agent... and never harder to make it safe. Vinod walks through Cisco's AI Agent 360: a framework combining custom guardrailing, red-teaming, runtime monitoring, and Splunk-powered observability to close that gap. One experience, not one agent: Cisco's new agentic context engine aims to deliver continuous, memory-rich customer conversations across every touchpoint – so it always feels like picking up where you left off. Workforce management, rebuilt: Cisco's new WEM suite is designed from the ground up for a workforce of both human and AI agents, because the 10-year-old model simply wasn't built for this.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com