Why Cisco is turning contact centers into context centers
SiliconANGLE Valentina Villamil ● Covered by 2 sources
Cisco wants support lines to remember the whole customer, not just the last call. That could make AI agents useful beyond one-off chats, but only if they’re built with real oversight.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Valentina Villamil — read the original for the full story.
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Cisco is pushing a small but telling rebrand: the contact center becomes a context center. The idea is simple enough. A customer doesn’t see departments. They see one company, and they expect the next conversation to pick up where the last one ended, whether the call starts at storefront, billing, or support.
Vinod Muthukrishnan, who runs Webex customer experience at Cisco, says the old label misses what AI can actually do. A bot that answers a question or completes one transaction is not what Cisco means by agentic CX. The company’s target is bigger: tools that can orchestrate a journey and, eventually, a relationship. That’s a lot more ambitious than a script-reading assistant.
But the ambition comes with a warning label. Muthukrishnan says it has never been easier to build an AI agent and never been harder to make one enterprise-grade. Cisco’s answer is AI Agent 360, a control plane that bundles observability, security and agent management instead of scattering them across separate products. His line about the whole thing is blunt: autonomy without accountability is a liability.
Cisco is also trying to make the front door feel seamless. Its AI Concierge is meant to carry context across channels and handoffs so a customer can knock on almost any door and keep the same conversation going. The company is pairing that with support for standards like Agent2Agent and the Model Context Protocol, which is a clear signal that it wants Webex agents to work with third-party systems rather than trap customers in one stack.
That matters because the real selling point here isn’t savings. Muthukrishnan says savings is just the entry point. The real pitch is governance first, scale second, and a much less chaotic way to let AI touch the customer relationship without turning every handoff into a reset button.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Cisco is right to be suspicious of the word agentic when it gets slapped on every chatbot with a pulse. The useful shift here is not more AI theatre, it’s boring things like observability, security and governance, which is where most enterprise AI dreams go to get a haircut. Open standards help too, because no one needs another shiny system that turns into a cage with better branding.
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