How Cisco Is Using AI Concierge Agents to Reinvent Customer Experience | Vinod Muthukrishnan

We see AI as having the potential to annex the productivity of the human race, and this

“is what happened with the industrial revolution. Instead of hammering everything with your hand,”

mass hammered this with the mechanical device, what more could you produce, and every single time a technology has come to humanity, which allows for this absolutely exponential unlock of productivity. We've only become better, we've produced more, increase the gross domestic output, and just become better office-a-days. I'm a huge optimist on that front. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a rad-cats network production.

We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes, you ready to start snap in next and cash in checks? Well, it starts right about now.

What's up guys, welcome to right about now. We're always talking about how and what and

where and why you can get right in business now. We're going on the biggest tech companies on the planet. It is Cisco, probably with the node, move the Christian and VP General Manager of WebEx customer experience. Thanks for having the super accepted to be here. I hear about AI all the time, but I don't hear it talked about customer terms in the experience

and how it's changing interfaces. Interface isn't always technology. It's sort of the how the customer experience had in any exchange of information. You've got some thoughts on this. You put a nice paper together, which I really appreciate your insights on. Thought to me about what's happening in this crazy, advancing world we live in. The great thing about being in the customer experience business is you're trying to make

your own lives as a customer better. There's some ulterior motives to doing this job.

“And I've always said this. It's an important statement to take away. A lot of”

technology principles are driven by one very simple quest. The quest is the purpose of AI an automation in our industry should be to make customer experience more human and not less. So it seems counterintuitive and an alternative you often give is imagine engaging with your favorite human. Any human you know. The fact that the context changes because one day for example, Ryan, if you and I have a besties, let's say we went to a ball game last week and then now you're

here to record a podcast. I haven't forgotten the fact that we went to a ball game last week. The context may have changed but I haven't forgotten what happened last time or the one before that or that you launched and you show or what have you. And conversation between you and your favorite human usually irrespective of channel, modality, point in time, the interval between them loose context. It feels like one continuous conversation between two humans. But you take

that to the world of customer experience. That is not how you engage with your favorite brand. Every time you call in, it's like groundhog day. You're calling in all the context pipeline, sometimes when you're transferred, the context is lost. It's really a disconnected experience. If you message in and you call that is lost. There isn't, I say that is when you look at AI and you break that onto functional terms. This is the experientially gap we need to fix.

We want like your favorite human for a brand to be always available for the customer

on a channel of choice. Always know your history and context. Don't force you to repeat yourself. They won't always tell you what you want to hear because neither your favorite human know your favorite brand should do that. They'll tell you with clarity on a channel of choice. And if you take these principles and dig them into technology, AI has this unprecedented

“opportunity and that's what I wrote in the paper. Use AI to create human like highly intuitive,”

highly pervasive experiences that we could not have delivered in the absence of AI. This is the philosophical sort of bent with which we're using AI in the realm of customer experience. What's up guys? One of the fastest ways to grow business. Isn't some big marketing play? It's tightening up your communication across your team. Miss calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. That's stuff quietly calls you time and revenue.

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dare to talk to can't be underestimated. For all of you in VACSTOM. Thought to me about those pain points that I'm describing that drive me crazy.

“So, obviously is the critical infrastructure for the AI age. You need to first be being a complete”

embrace of this technology before you can propagate and go to your customers and talk about it. Even beyond customer experience in the area of product development, efficiency, collaboration, but have you, we have completely embraced an AI native working approach. As it comes to customer experience itself, our belief is very foundational. We have a platform which allows you to communicate with your customers by directionally on any channel of joy.

Voice, voice, messaging, what have you? We are seeing this evolution of agents in the front end of that conversation that we've wrote written in the paper, I call Concierge agents, which is agents that can essentially be the face of the conversation between the brand and the customer. And the reason it's called a Concierge agent is because it's able to do some highly intuitive, highly intelligent things in the background. It is able to converse with other

sub agents, first party and third party, interoperate with them, get the context, orchestrate certain

actions. But for you, the customer, it is like every single time I call this brand or what have you, I feel like I'm having a conversation with the brand as opposed to department X or

“department Y or Z. For us, the big, big evolution that I think Cisco's embraced is the emergence”

of these Concierge agents which become the face of the brand and mask all the complexity for the end customer. Delivered truly elevated experience, because earlier, even with the human in the loop, you'd have to essentially say, let me call this department or let me transfer you or stay listen to Mozart's symphony for the next 15 minutes. All of these things will happen because you are cracking down an individual who's sitting in some office somewhere who's the soul owner of

that knowledge. And I think he is allowing us to break down these silos and really allow for this

continuous, transitional experience to happen. Extremely bullish about it, we are in house users of

it too. So for our own support teams, we use our contact center, AI, top footing. It is the best way to get efficiency in it. You've spoken to Arna before and Arna insists that it's not eating your own dog food, it's drinking your own champagne. You said something that just unlocked something from my brain in the way it works. These agents taking on the persona of the brand. When I think of branding and marketing and like you think of tone and manner and colors, but it's really

interesting and fascinating now that we have this age of AI, this artificial intelligence that can speak and write. Do all of these things in what personality it can take on. How that is actually a huge part of the brand experience. These branded agents so to speak, they're obviously doing these tasks to make the customer serious positive. Every brand has a little bit of a different persona, different edge. They're helpful. They're innovative. They're edgy. It's fascinating to me to think

about how you could program the AI in a way to live and breathe that brand. Absolutely right, there may be 10 companies in the space and each has a value. You may have airlines with say, cheapest fare but no frills and they may have full service airlines which say, "I'm going to give you this red carpeted white glove kind of service." And all interfaces into the brand should reflect that reality. That kind of customization is important, but there are two parts. One is how do you present

which is, does this sound like my brand? Is it in the style and the theme and whatever of my brand? But to form real loyalty beyond that, does this brand know me and does it care about me? And we've often spoken about what I mentioned earlier which is the importance of context. When you invest in technologies below the iLine which you don't notice, but which deliver intuitively great experiences.

“You have to knit it through the brand is a higher and I'll take an example on a no-name basis”

with a customer and they came on stage at one of my events and actually spoke about this. And they essentially spoke about a simple fact that somebody was calling into reschedule an appointment and there's no problem. I'll be scheduled to the appointment and said, "Great, can I get a reason filling up reason for why people reschedule?" And they did. And they said, "I need to visit my brother who has an illness. Let's call it cancer." And so obviously the

agent did what it explained the agent to do. I'm sorry to hear about that. I'll reschedule. But as the conversation went on, agent did what you'd expect an empathetic human to do which is, I hope you brought the fields better. And small, it seems insignificant but it still retains a humanity of the conversation. And I think brands that consistently show up in caring about their customer. It is a small moment where you build lasting relationships. Like we have a demo that

we showed everybody which is someone calls in and the AI agent says, "Hey Carlos, thanks for calling in. Hope you're back feeling better." And he says, "No, actually I'm calling up about that because you know, it still hurts and I need to get in touch with the doctor." Everything that, along with the front end personalization, which is brand specific, adding the element of humanity and context and what's relevant for the customer. I think truly helps a brand stand out for

what is supposed to mean in the customer's life. How to proceed? Hey guys, if you've ever built a website before, you know how quickly you get turned into a

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stuff happen. Go to wix.com/harmony. That's wix.com/harmony. Start your website today. You mention multi-agent and the collaborative exchange that they can have. What does that unleash as far as what's possible in customer experience with that capability? That is the question of hard time. We had conversation agents for the last decade we've been playing around with this NLU-based agents. It barely got your numbers right and it says,

you set five and it says, "Why?" and you're like fighting with the agent. And then you're task agents. Task agents just do work. For example, on a web X platform, you have a note-taker agent or a recording agent or a transcription agent. It just does a job till you ask it to stop or in some cases you ask it to start. It just does the job. Then you had conversational agent that made these task agents. And now you could talk about something and it gets it done. For example,

reschedule my appointment. My pharmacy prescription refill of what have you. But these are all straight-line. This is not agent. Agentic is essentially a unit having a conversation wherein in a human world, if you're best friends, I'm like, "Hey Ryan, I'm out today. Can you help me with this? Go home. Can you do this? The keys under the mat? Check if this is possible. If it's not there, so it's a set of things wherein at some point in time, you

know me enough to say, "Okay fine, if I don't find the key, they're what I'm supposed to do." In an AI agent world, it involves, as I said, the concierge agent owning the conversation between brand and customer. And then taking what the customer saying, "It can be ten requests. It's not one intent. You may be asking me for something which allows me to check for a dependency." And now this concierge agent takes what the customer's saying and starts to parse it for what the customer wants.

And may have to go over to multiple subsystems to find out. For example, hey can you please check

if I can fly first class to Japan? No, I like great. I need to check for your rolling great. I

“you a lot. Let's assume the company's policies there. And next, how many hours is the policy?”

Let's say there's a check on, do you have budget? If both are true, do you have budget? And it may have to go to different systems and then go to this travel portal and book this ticket. And you know what? Only book it if it is less than $2,000. Let's assume you've given this complex set of asks. Now, you may need to wait and you say, "I have to tell the end of the week to book." It might run successive things to see if the Fed drops or there's a promo or something's happening.

So this task execution window is very, very long. It's not that risk-aging my appointment and the task is done. You've given a very complex command to this agent. It is not able to execute it itself. It has to go to multiple sub agents. Some system has to thread the context between these and ultimately come back and tell you when the job is done. That is where agents are evolving. We're in there able to hold a conversation with you across multiple contexts, orchestrated the

action of multiple sub agents. Keep that task execution window open for a very long period of time and may trade off and down to stream decisions. This is some guardrails and rules. Of course,

“and get the job done. You will see this huge shift away from task execution. The job's”

getting done. That will be the true unlaw of what I call agent XAX. So everybody be fair in their jobs, for no reason. Every time she answered this a week, I'm just going to get it out of the way because somebody is going to say, "Why did you ask me if it's taking all the jobs?" I'm going to just get to go there. I've had a couple of people decidedly spotted and we say a couple of things that I wholeheartedly agree with. One is an personal space. What I tell myself is there's a

lesser chance of air taking my job than a better air powered human taking my job. I'm definitely in a full embrace of air in my own personal jobs. I don't want to make a proud statement on humanity, but in the customer experience realm itself, we feel that humans essentially will become strategic problems, solvers in random as to there's just an unbelievable amount of human productivity that is locked and capped in doing jobs and fast that don't need human cognition. So if you were to

unlock humans from doing, for example, password research and just click this button, check the status of my order. And even do other complex stuff wherein a human has to wait on a line with another team for 30 minutes for them to come online and then tell them, "Can we do this or not?" Air can do all of this. You can automate all of these flows. The delta is if that is the case then, what can and should the human be doing? And we've said this often, we've said this on stage,

which is there's 8 billion people in the planet. We see AI as having the potential to 10x

the productivity of the human race. And this is what happened with the industrial revolution. Instead of hammering everything with your hand, mass hammer this with the mechanical device, what more could you produce? And every single time a technology has come to humanity, which allows for this absolutely exponential unlock of productivity. We've only become better,

I'm a huge optimist on that front. And in the customer experience realm,

“it will take away downstream work, but it will make the humans who are in the loop much more”

valuable and very, very critical subject matter experts and overseers in this new customer experience

on my field. You talk about the end of CX silos. Talk to me about what that means and speaking this common language, needing to speak a common language and what's broken today. The broken experience is because either data is siloed or systems are siloed or the front ends are siloed. In many cases, all three. For example, the system that messages you that your payment is due is offer for messaging platform. You may have some CPAS platform,

it generates automated alerts that, hey, Monday is your M&DU, here's your reminder. When that happens, you have a question which is, okay, I don't have the $900 to pay, can I break it up into

“installments without accruing interest? That becomes a support query. Now you realize that message”

was one way message and it's broken. So I need to now call 1-800 what have you to ask you that is possible. And then that thinks it's hang on, let me check your eligibility word. If you bring all of this together, wherein you get a message, it says your payment is due. You have a question which is kind of break it up into, how long can a break it up to get interest-free installments and am I eligible? The ability to respond back to that same message on the same channel in

that same context, get your answers. So what started as a notification which is more compliance becomes a support query. And then turns out for your profile, we actually have a 12-month zero interest offer or a two percent interest offer, whatever that number is. That would have been on some other day a phone call from a call center to you saying, "Hey, and it looks like you've got 10,000 outstanding on your card. Do you want a zero interest payment? That's a sales exercise.

All these three happened in the same conversation on the same channel, starting from one context.

“AI and bringing the context together is allowing us to do that. And I think that is what the”

great unlock is. And because of our ability to function call these back in systems and all of that, we are able to do this, historically they were harder to do. That said, organizations do need to solve the data out of the pyramid first. Because if your data is completely siloed, your systems access are not opened up using protocols like MCP, then it'll be very hard to bring these agent pick up experience to life. The node chief, friction killer of Cisco.

I always make up titles for my guess. Is your specific place where people can find you on

social or things like that? It's the node underscore CC on X, the node M Christianen on LinkedIn, but we will definitely drop in the links to some of these at the end of the show. We'll have all of those in the show notes and really appreciate the fascinating discussion. There's a lot. There's so much happening in this space and the node and the team at Cisco are right at the forefront. Really appreciate you for coming on and sharing perspective for note. Thank you so much for

having me Ryan. I do appreciate the auction here. Thank you. Ryan is right.com. That's the website. That's where you'll see the full episode, highlight clips, all the information and links to the nodes information and his paper and everything Cisco's up to. We have links, some of their programs, and everything that they want to share. We'll have all of that for easy access in the show notes and the website. Hey, all this stuff is here. All this stuff is now and we got the chief

friction killer. Always telling us what's up. We appreciate it. We'll see you next time on right about now.

This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. This is Ryan is right.com for full audio and video versions of the show, or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening. All of this is super-intergrier and useful. And the time and the money that I can't be able to understand. For all of you in the show. Now, the cost list is on shopify.de.