Cisco Systems Inc. said today it’s bringing agentic artificial intelligence capabilities to its contact center and video conferencing platforms, helping customer service agents and employees boost their productivity through automation.

The new capabilities, announced at the company’s annual Webex One event in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, include a new Webex AI Agent that’s designed to take customer calls on behalf of human agents. The company also announced the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex Contact Center, which is a digital assistant for human contact center employees, designed to help them be more efficient while dealing with customers.

In addition, the company announced a new AI Agent Studio for companies that want to create their own, customized AI agents for use in Webex Contact Center.

Agentic AI chatbots

With today’s updates, Cisco is looking to take the lead in a contact center industry that has eagerly embraced the capabilities of AI. Virtually every contact center software provider offers some kind of AI-powered chatbots for handling basic customer queries, before handing off the more difficult ones to human agents.

But with Webex AI Agent, Cisco says it’s going one better, as its chatbots will be able to perform much more complicated tasks, and reduce the workload that humans are required to deal with. The Webex AI Agent leverages advanced natural dialogue and conversational intelligence to deliver faster resolutions, reducing wait times for callers.

As an example, Cisco said issues such as a consumer needing to rebook 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, companies will be able to create customized, self-service options for such use cases, so consumers can complete these tasks without human agent assistance. According to Cisco, early adopters have seen a 39% improvement in customer satisfaction since they began implementing the technology.

Cisco Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel said the quality of customer service has a big impact on a brand’s reputation, so they can’t afford to get it wrong. “Webex AI Agent solves customer problems instantaneously and will fundamentally transform the experiences we have all grown accustomed to,” he promised.

Within the Webex AI Agent, customers will also be able to play around with Cisco’s AI Agent Studio, which provides an interface and tools for training customized AI bots that possess more context about their business. Customers will be able to use their own AI models and train them on their own data, and deploy them within Webex Contact Center, improving the capabilities of their chatbots further, the company said.

Cisco said Webex AI Agent and AI Agent Studio will both become generally available for 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, this is an AI bot that’s designed to assist human agents, who will still be necessary to handle the most complicated customer issues that Webex AI Agent cannot deal with. Generally available now, provides automated guidance for call center agents as they deal with each caller, delivering at-a-glance context summaries to facilitate the hand-off from chatbot to human, who will immediately be able to see what the caller’s problem is.

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

The AI Assistant isn’t the only way that Cisco is taking care of human agents. With the new Agent Wellness capability announced today, it’s providing contact center managers with some useful capabilities such as automatic breaks for agents to prevent them from getting burned out. Other features include better agent scheduling and tools for increasing or decreasing each agent’s workflow on the fly.

More immersive virtual meetings

Finally, the company also revealed a number of updates for enterprise users of the Webex video conferencing platform to facilitate virtual meetings The new stuff includes a feature called Spatial Meetings that can transform any space equipped with a Cisco Room Bar into a more immersive, studio-like environment with immersive, spatial audio.

There’s a new piece of hardware too, called the Cisco Ceiling Microphone, which helps to capture natural conversation from anywhere in the room. It uses AI to detect where the voices are coming from and adjust the microphone on the fly, so it can always focus on the person who is speaking. It’s compatible with various Cisco cameras and room systems, and replaces the need for individual microphones for each user.

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