As AI agents move into customer experience workflows, handling queries, processing transactions, and triggering backend actions, they introduce a new layer of security risk that goes beyond traditional chatbots.
“With chatbots, we worried about what they would say. With agents, we worry about what they do,” said Jeff Schultz, Senior Vice President of Portfolio Strategy for Cisco’s product organization, in a media briefing.
That shift raises the stakes for security teams and customer experience leaders responsible for delivering safe, reliable customer interactions.
At the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, Cisco is going after that problem by rolling out a set of security capabilities designed to make autonomous AI safe enough for real-world use.
As AI evolves, enterprises are focusing more on how to network and connect compute capability in a highly secure way, Schultz said.
“We also see a trust deficit. We know that all of our customers are driving to move very, very quickly with AI, but trust is holding them back… this is something that we believe has to be addressed to be able to truly see the potential of AI come forward for our customers.”
A recent Cisco enterprise customer survey found that 85 percent had experimented with AI agents, but only 5 percent had moved agentic technology into production.
Cisco aims to address that with new security capabilities that establish trusted identities, enforce strict Zero Trust Access controls, harden agents before deployment, enforce guardrails at runtime, and give security operations center (SOC) teams the tools to stop threats at machine speed.
From Chatbots to Action-Taking Agents
The move into agentic AI means having autonomous systems “essentially become co-workers sitting side by side with humans in the workforce,” Schultz noted. These agents can help teams to deliver faster, increase productivity and accomplish tasks they couldn’t before.
When it comes to customer experience, that means AI moving deeper into journeys, handling tasks, resolving issues and interacting with systems.
But that autonomy requires new safeguards.
“[W]hat they're able to do, they're doing at machine speed. They're doing it relentlessly, and at the same time, they also act without consequences… they will do whatever is needed to accomplish their task, and they'll do exactly what you say, not necessarily what you mean. And so we really need to re-imagine security as this agentic workforce joins us.”
Cisco’s approach centers on giving AI agents identities, tying them to human owners, and tightly controlling what they can do.
But the bigger shift is conceptual. There have traditionally been distinctions between human and machine access to systems, noted Tom Gillis, Cisco’s Senior Vice President and General Manager for Infrastructure and Security.
“As we start to move into a world of AI agents, these two lines begin to blur, and it's not enough to simply think about access control for an agent, we have to move to action control.”
For example, an agent built to process expense reports needs to be able to access travel systems, receipts, and credit card accounts, but should not be able to make purchases.
“The challenge is, if I write a hard coded rule that says, ‘don't buy a Porsche,’ the agent, being an eager little beaver, will say, ‘okay, cool, I'll buy a McLaren,’” Gillis said. Access control for autonomous agents goes beyond what permissions they have in various systems to the actions they could potentially take once they’re inside. That “is a fundamental rethink of how security systems work.” For customer experience teams, it’s also the difference between a helpful automation and a costly mistake.
Cisco is approaching agentic AI security from three aspects: protecting the world from agents so that they can only act as intended; protecting agents to ensure they can't be manipulated or corrupted; and detecting and responding to AI incidents at machine speed and scale.