tech
Cisco exec says adopting AI is like 'surgery without the drugs'
Liz Centoni, Cisco's chief customer experience officer, is working to reinvent her 20,000-employee division for the AI era. "It's painful," she says.
TL;DR
- Cisco's chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, described AI integration as 'surgery without the drugs,' indicating a painful but necessary process.
- The company initially used generative AI for customer support case summaries, but this only 'annoyed customers faster' by improving handoffs without solving the root problem of reaching the right engineer.
- Cisco redesigned its customer support workflow with 'intelligent routing,' resulting in nearly 88% of 1.5 million annual cases being routed to the correct engineer on the first attempt.
- Centoni suggests integrating AI into repeatable workflows with over 90% accuracy and launching new tools like Cisco IQ to address customer pain points.
- The success of AI projects is measured not just by efficiency but also by their ability to stop work, grow revenue, expand margins, deepen customer trust, or enable future development.