Cisco has declared that the AI chatbot era is over, and the AI-native contact center era has arrived.
The networking giant used its annual Las Vegas event to unveil a suite of innovations under the Webex CX umbrella, including AI WEM, AI Concierge, and Agent 360.
All of these tools are targeting what it calls the “agentic workforce,” a blended environment where human and AI agents work side by side, managed, secured, and orchestrated from a single platform.
Speaking to CX Today ahead of the announcements, Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, didn't mince words on where the industry stands right now:
“It's never been easier to build an AI agent. It's, however, never been harder to make it enterprise-grade. And that's the dichotomy we've got to deal with.”
That tension sits at the heart of much of what Cisco announced this week.
AI WEM: Workforce Management Rebuilt from the Ground Up
The most significant announcement is arguably Webex AI Workforce Engagement Management.
Cisco describes the solution as a complete rebuild of workforce tooling designed specifically for environments where human and AI agents coexist.
The suite covers forecasting, scheduling, quality management, performance dashboards, real-time agent guidance, and AI-powered onboarding.
Every capability works across both human and AI agents – a point Cisco is pushing hard, given that most legacy WEM tools were built for a world where every agent was human and every evaluation was manual and sampled.
Muthukrishnan made the case for why the rebuild was necessary, claiming that “if you had to build workforce afresh today, it would not look like the workforce from 10 years ago.
“You've got to account for this new coworker whose constraints are different. Capacity is theoretically not a constraint. Budget, however, is.”
AI Quality Management – which automatically evaluates 100% of interactions across both human and AI agents – is targeted for general availability in Q3 CY27. Performance Management and AI-Powered Assist are available now.
AI Concierge: One Experience, No Matter What
Cisco is also launching AI Concierge, a pre-built AI agent designed to act as a brand's front door, orchestrating across knowledge bases, other AI agents, and enterprise systems to deliver what Cisco describes as one continuous, hyper-personalized conversation.
The product is built around persistent memory, meaning that regardless of channel, timing, or number of handoffs, each interaction should feel like a continuation of the last.
Muthukrishnan framed the vision to CX Today like this: