Cisco's Chief Customer Experience Officer, Liz Centoni, describes integrating AI into the company's massive global operations as "surgery without the drugs" — painful but essential. With a division of 20,000 employees handling 1.5 million support cases annually, the stakes are high.
The Wrong Approach: Bolting AI onto Old Workflows
Cisco initially tried using generative AI to create case summaries for support engineer handoffs. The result? It only "annoyed our customers faster" by making flawed processes more efficient. The real issue wasn't the handoff—it was getting the right engineer the first time.
The Right Solution: Intelligent Routing
Cisco redesigned its workflow using "intelligent routing" to send cases to the right expert from the start. Now, nearly 88% of cases are routed correctly on the first try. Success is measured by the number of calls requiring zero or one handoffs.
Where AI Works Best
Centoni advises focusing AI on repeatable workflows that can be performed autonomously with over 90% accuracy. Cisco's new Cisco IQ platform serves as a single source of truth for customers, detecting preventable outages, reducing data interpretation time, and cutting frustrating support calls.
The Ultimate Test
For Centoni, every AI project must answer: What work will it stop? And it must grow revenue, expand margins, deepen customer trust, or help teams build what comes next.
Cisco says AI transformation goes beyond bolting the technology onto existing workflows.
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