Cisco Systems Inc. today announced that it is bringing agentic artificial intelligence capabilities to its contact center and video conferencing platforms, helping agents and customer service employees increase their productivity through automation.

The new features, announced at the company’s annual Webex One event in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida includes a new Webex AI agent designed to answer customer calls on behalf of human agents. The company also announced Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, a digital assistant for human contact center employees designed to help them be more effective in their relationships with customers.

Additionally, the company announced a new AI Agent Studio for businesses that want to create their own custom AI agents for use in Webex Contact Center.

Agentic AI Chatbots

With today’s updates, Cisco seeks to take the lead in a contact center industry that has enthusiastically embraced AI capabilities. Virtually every contact center software vendor offers some sort of AI-powered chatbot to handle basic customer queries, before handing off the more difficult ones to human agents.

But with Webex AI Agent, Cisco says things are even better, as its chatbots will be able to perform much more complicated tasks and reduce the workload that humans have to handle. The Webex AI agent leverages advanced natural dialogue and conversational intelligence to provide faster resolutions, reducing wait times for callers.

As an example, Cisco said issues such as whether a consumer needs to book a flight or replace a lost debit card almost always involve a human agent, but that’s no longer the case. With Webex AI Agent, businesses will be able to create custom self-service options for such use cases, so consumers can complete these tasks without the assistance of a human agent. According to Cisco, early adopters have seen a 39% improvement in customer satisfaction since they began implementing the technology.

Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and chief product officer of Cisco, said that the quality of customer service has a big impact on a brand’s reputation and hence it cannot afford to get it wrong. “Webex AI Agent instantly solves customer problems and will fundamentally transform the experiences we are all accustomed to,” he promised.

Within Webex AI Agent, customers will also be able to play with Cisco’s AI Agent Studio, which provides an interface and tools to train custom AI bots with more context about their business. Customers will be able to take their own AI models, train them on their own data, and deploy them in Webex Contact Center, further enhancing the capabilities of their chatbots, the company said.

Cisco said Webex AI Agent and AI Agent Studio will both be generally available to cloud customers in the first quarter of next year, while on-premises customers will be able to preview them starting in the second quarter.

Assistants for human agents

As for Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, it is an AI bot designed to assist human agents, who will still be needed to handle the more complex customer issues that Webex AI Agent cannot handle. Generally available now, provides automated guidance to call center agents as they handle each caller, providing at-a-glance contextual summaries to facilitate the handoff from chatbot to human, who will immediately be able to see what the caller’s problem is.

In addition to context, Cisco AI Assistant will also provide suggested responses to agents. It is smart enough to listen and understand the conversion between the agent and the customer, and will immediately tell the agent what to do next to resolve the customer’s problem as soon as possible.

The AI ​​Assistant isn’t the only way Cisco deals with human agents. With the new Agent Wellness feature announced today, it provides contact center managers with helpful features like automatic breaks for agents to help prevent burnout. Other features include better agent scheduling and tools to scale each agent’s workflow up or down on the fly.

More immersive virtual meetings

Finally, the company also revealed a number of updates aimed at business users of the Webex video conferencing platform to make virtual meetings easier. New features include a feature called Spatial Meetings that can transform any space equipped with a Cisco Room Bar into a more immersive studio. as an environment with immersive spatial sound.

There’s also new hardware, called the Cisco Ceiling Microphone, that allows natural conversation to be captured from anywhere in the room. It uses AI to detect where voices are coming from and adjust the microphone on the fly, so you can always focus on the person speaking. It is compatible with various Cisco cameras and room systems and replaces the need for individual microphones for each user.

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