Cisco Aims to Turn Contact Centers Into Context Centers

The interview, conducted by theCUBE Research’s Bob Laliberte and ZK Research’s Zeus Kerravala at “The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit,” was broadcast exclusively on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. Muthukrishnan discussed what separates a context center from a traditional contact center and how Cisco is building observability and security into every AI agent it ships.

He said a customer calling a support line does not think about org charts and does not know or care whether they have reached the storefront, billing department or contact center, because to them it is all one continuous relationship with a brand. Most companies cannot deliver on that assumption today because their systems do not share context across touchpoints, which is why some vendors are pushing the contact center toward a hub that carries a customer’s history with it everywhere they go.

Muthukrishnan said he has spent the past several months building out that vision under a broader Cisco banner called agentic CX. He argued the industry has overused the word agentic, since a bot that completes a single transaction does not really qualify on its own. “An AI agent that can fill a slot or fulfill a transaction is not agentic. Agentic is much more of a framework of tools and products and processes,” he said. “The big thing around agentic is going away from just voice agents that can answer a question, fulfill a transaction, to orchestrating a journey, to now evolving all the way to be able to orchestrate a relationship.”

That relationship-first approach only works if it is safe at scale, Muthukrishnan said, because a system handling entire customer relationships autonomously has far more room to go wrong than one built to answer a single question. Cisco’s answer is AI Agent 360, which folds observability, security and agent management into one control plane rather than treating them as separate products from separate vendors. “It’s never been easier to build an AI agent. It’s never been harder to make it enterprise-grade,” he said. “There’s a line we often use. We say autonomy without accountability is a liability.”

The philosophy carries into what Muthukrishnan calls the intelligent front door, the AI Concierge Cisco is building to carry a customer’s context across every channel and handoff. He traced the goal to a line one of Cisco’s customers used during a recent workshop. “They said there is no wrong door,” Muthukrishnan said. “No matter which touchpoint, what channel, where in the enterprise you knock, the door opens and miraculously it’s almost the same person on the other side. The context is continuous, and you’re picking up the conversation from where it left off.”

Cisco is pairing that vision with a push for openness across the industry, supporting standards such as Agent2Agent and the Model Context Protocol so Webex agents can work alongside third-party systems rather than locking customers into a single stack. Muthukrishnan said Cisco would rather be the platform enterprises build on than the one product they are stuck with. “Savings, or what have you, is the entry point, not the exit point,” he said. “Have a very ambitious North Star, but build a framework where you’ve understood the risk, the mitigation of the risk and the governance of the platform before you try to scale it.”

According to SiliconANGLE, Cisco sponsored the segment of theCUBE in which the interview appeared. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.