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Research from Cisco has predicted that agentic AI will handle over two-thirds of customer service and support interactions by 2028.
Cisco’s global research report, “The race to an agentic future: How agentic AI will transform customer experience”, also found that more than half of interactions with agentic AI will occur within the next 12 months.
“With agentic AI reaching a new level of maturity, we’re closer than ever to solving some of the most persistent customer pain points in enterprise environments,” said Liz Centoni, Cisco EVP Chief Customer Experience Officer.
“For instance, a significant share of network issues stem from misconfiguration, something agentic systems are poised to eliminate. That shift will lead to smarter networks, stronger security, and more productive teams,” she added.
“As an industry, we’ve been talking about these concepts for decades, and while we’ve made incremental progress, AI – and especially agentic AI – is making that vision a reality.”
In surveying 7,950 global business and technical decision makers across 30 countries, Cisco said 88% of respondents feel confident the agentic AI-led customer experience provided by technology partners can help their organisations achieve goals.
That’s almost nine in ten people, but it’s worth digging into what those goals actually are.
One is to make their IT environments and operations more efficient, resilient and secure. We can see that. Another: accelerating their most important strategic IT projects, which again makes sense. Or there’s the hazier “maximising value from their IT investments”.
At the same time, 93% of respondents also predict that agentic AI will enable more personalised, proactive and predictive services.
Fewer people, but still roughly 80%, believe there could be benefits of agentic AI-led customer experience at every stage of the “technology lifecycle”. That covers customer and technical support, plus technology strategy and planning.
Other findings? That organisations are leaning on technology vendors more than ever before as IT complexity increases, with 92% of respondents stating the support and services provided by vendors are becoming more critical in the AI era.
Nearly all respondents said it’s important for technology partners to demonstrate robust governance arrangements to deliver ethical use of agentic AI. 81% feel that vendors need to share their vision for AI-led customer experience to bring customers along on the journey.
Despite the growing use of agentic AI, the report indicated that human interaction is irreplaceable, with 96% stating that human relationships are very important when interacting with B2B technology partners.
