Cisco Systems Inc. is upgrading Webex with new artificial intelligence features designed to make customer service teams more productive.

The company debuted the update today at the Enterprise Connect communications conference. Some of the enhancements will roll out this month, while the rest are set to become available later in 2025.

Webex is a communications platform that workers can use to host videoconferences, organize webinars and field customer support requests. The software also provides features for other tasks such as running employee polls. Cisco says that Webex is used by 95% of the Fortune 500.

Webex Contact Center, a version of the platform geared toward customer service teams, includes an automation tool called the AI Assistant. At Enterprise Connect today, Cisco previewed a new release of AI Assistant that can transcribe customer calls in near-real-time. It will also provide support representatives with advice on how they should respond to user requests.

“Suggested responses display contextual real-time recommendations on how the agent should respond or what actions they can take next when working on an interaction,” Snorre Kjesbu, senior vice president and general manager of employee experiences at Cisco, wrote in a blog post. “These recommendations are displayed directly within the agent desktop within the AI assistant.”

According to Cisco, AI Assistant doubles as a task automation engine. The company is rolling out integrations that will allow the tool to take actions in third-party applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Jira. A support representative could, for example, ask AI Assistant to create a new lead record when a customer expresses interest in making a purchase.

Alongside AI Assistant, Webex provides a second automation tool called AI Agent that Cisco previewed last year. The latter feature can answer customer questions and automatically perform repetitive business tasks. Cisco today announced plans to move AI Agent into generally available on March 31.

Webex Calling, Cisco’s cloud-based phone system, is receiving new AI features as well. The company today previewed an upcoming release of the platform that will be capable of automatically routing each customer call to the agent best-equipped to field it. Cisco is also promising “AI assistance for agents and supervisors.”

Administrators can manage their companies’ Webex environments through a dashboard called the Control Hub. According to Cisco, the tool is being upgraded with settings for customizing Webex’s AI features. Control Hub will also display data on how workers interact with those features to help administrators track adoption.

Cisco is rolling out the new capabilities alongside integrations with several third-party services.

The first integration is with Epic, one of the healthcare sector’s most widely used applications for managing electronic health records. Joint customers can now access Webex without leaving the Epic interface. A second new integration will enable Webex to surface business data using search technology from Glean Technologies Inc., a well-funded AI startup. 

Photo: Cisco