There is a growing duality of opposing forces that needs to be dealt with if customers are to have success with artificial intelligence.

My research shows that more than 90% of organizations believe the network to be more important to business operations than it was two years ago. At the same time, almost the same number believe it to be more complex. These opposing forces of complexity and importance needs to get solved if companies are to attain the return on investment they seek with AI.

This week at Cisco Partner Summit, the company’s annual reseller event, Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled a new digital platform that provides information technology teams with a tool built on the unification of the company’s data to monitor technology, run system check and fix issues before they escalate. Built with AI, Cisco IQ combines automation, analytics and Cisco’s own technical insights into a single dashboard.

The reinvention of Cisco Customer Experience, which is Cisco’s support and services organization, is something Liz Centoni, a Cisco executive vice president and chief customer experience officer, has been working on since she became leader of the group about 18 months ago. What’s interesting about Centoni is that she has a product background as opposed one of services, but that helped in transforming the team.

At Partner Summit I asked Centoni why having come from product was an advantage. “Cisco is a product company and CX is here to support the technology,” she said. “The goal of Cisco IQ is to fundamentally change the nature of supporting and servicing customers by proactively addressing problems before they emerge.” Like much of the industry, Cisco’s support model has traditionally focused on fixing problems after they occur. Though this reactive motion has been the norm, it keeps engineers in firefighting mode.

Because of its massive footprint, Cisco has a tremendous amount of infrastructure data – perhaps more than any other vendor. During her keynote, Centoni explained how agentic AI is used to change the service model.

“CX is the sweet spot for agentic because it gives us the opportunity to change the nature of how we interact with our customers,” she said. “We become trusted advisers, not just service requestors or case processors as our teams have complete context.”

Historically, she added, “we solved problems by throwing more people into the mix, but this is exactly what an agentic system was built for. It’s continuously learning, predicting and understanding the whole stack.” It’s important to note the “we” Centoni referred to was inclusive of the more than a half-million partners Cisco has, as many of them rely on Cisco CX as part of their services.

Cisco IQ combines several key capabilities. It allows IT teams to run on-demand assessments for security, configurations and compliance, but also emerging areas such as quantum readiness and regulatory checks. The assessments present potential risks or misconfigurations, along with clear guidance on how to address these issues. Beyond assessments, Cisco IQ provides visibility into an organization’s entire asset inventory. For example, it shows device health, software versions and lifecycle timelines.

All of this is enabled by agentic AI agents that analyze, diagnose and resolve problems. Cisco’s research found that 93% of its customers believe agentic AI will create more personalized, proactive and predictive experiences. That expectation aligns with Cisco’s own vision where every interaction feels tailored to the customer’s unique needs.

Cisco IQ is built on a series of purpose-built agents that work together to improve service. One looks at documents and creates a knowledge base, others diagnose devices, retrieves information, and handles remediation. These agents work together to provide solutions through the Cisco IQ interface. Cisco’s goal is to build hundreds of these agents that talk to one another and orchestrate the work for its customers.

Centoni shared an example of how Cisco IQ can read and interpret complex technical documents, of which Cisco has many, and turn that information into automated system checks. During a demo, Cisco IQ performed a security assessment that showed how many devices were affected and where the issues were. From there, IT teams could click to see more details, including AI-generated summaries that explained the problem in plain language. The same assessment could be repeated to confirm that all the issues were resolved. A process that once required people to read long documents and cross-check configurations was mostly automated.

Organizations have several flexible options when it comes to deploying Cisco IQ, which will roll out in the second half of FY2026. It can be deployed as a software as a service platform, hosted and maintained by Cisco. It can be installed on-premises inside a company’s own data center but still tethered to Cisco’s cloud. In highly secure environments, Cisco IQ can run offline (air-gapped), without external network connections.

Centoni noted that Cisco IQ is part of a broader effort to simplify and unify CX across all of Cisco’s service models. As part of the rollout, Cisco is consolidating its services into two offerings: Cisco Support with standard, enhanced and signature tiers, and Cisco Professional Services, available as either a subscription or onetime engagements.

During my discussion, I asked Centoni why this was announced at Partner Summit versus Cisco Live, which is targeted at users. She explained that partners are key to how Cisco plans to deliver Cisco IQ. Partners can support their customers no matter how their systems are set up and at every stage, from planning and deployment to ongoing management. The platform gives partners access to the same automation and intelligence tools Cisco uses internally.

In the next few quarters, Cisco will trial Cisco IQ with a select set of partners, and then roll it out broadly. An interesting part of the process and a test for Cisco IQ, is that the company is not asking its partners, or even its own teams, to go through any steps to get it up and running. Those steps will be dynamic, with a goal of meeting customers where they are and what their intent is. Cisco IQ uses generative AI and agentic AI to be able to provide the right instructions and the right information to customers and partners.

Centoni wrapped up her keynote by talking about the evolution of Cisco CX. “This is not just repackaging of what we already have,” she said. “We’re delivering real time, passive insights, comprehensive infrastructure assessments and proximity troubleshooting powered by AI, which enables to deliver what customers want  resiliency, simplicity and faster time to value.”

Cisco IQ represents a new approach in how IT delivers value in an AI-driven era. By reducing day-to-day friction and giving organizations the tools to act sooner, they can spend more time focusing on innovation and resilience rather than firefighting.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala