How Cisco Is Using AI Concierge Agents to Reinvent Customer Experience | Vinod Muthukrishnan

We see AI as having the potential to 10X the productivity of the human race and this is what happened with the industrial revolution instead of hammering everything with your hand mass hammer this with the mechanical device what more could you produce and every single time a technology has come to humanity which allows for this absolutely exponential unlock of productivity we've only become better we produced more increase the gross domestic output and just become better off as it is I'm a huge optimist on that front this is right about now with Ryan Alfred Radcast Network production we are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes you ready to start snapping next and cash and checks well it starts right about now What's up guys welcome to write about now we're always talking about how and what and where and why you can get right in business now we're going to one of the biggest tech companies on the planet it is Cisco talking with the node move the Christian the VP general manager of WebEx customer experience and thanks for having the super excited to be I hear about AI all the time but I don't hear it talked about customer terms in the experience and how it's changing interfaces interface is the technology it's sort of the how the customer experience had in any exchange of information you've got some thoughts on this you put a nice paper together which I really appreciate your insights on talk to me about what's happening in this crazy advancing world we live in the great thing about being in the customer experience business is you're trying to make your own lives as a customer better there's some ulterior motives to doing this job and I've always said this it's an important statement to take away a lot of technology principles are driven by one very simple quest the quest is a purpose of AI an automation in our industry should be to make customer experience more human and not less so it seems counterintuitive and and I'll to be often give is imagine engaging with your favorite human any human you know the fact that the context changes because one day for example trying to view on our besties let's say we went to a ballgame last week and then now you're here to record a podcast I haven't forgotten the fact that we went to a ballgame last week the context may have changed but I haven't forgotten what happened last time or the one before that or that you launched and you show or what have you and conversation between you and your favorite human usually irrespective of channel modality point in time the interval between them lose context it feels like one continuous conversation between two humans but you take that to the world of customer experience that is not how you engage with your favorite brand every time you call in it's like groundhog day you're calling in all the context quite clean sometimes when you're transferred the context is lost it's really a disconnected experience if you message in and you call that is lost the reason I say that is when you look at AI and you break that onto functional terms this is the experientially gap we need to fix we want like your favorite human for a brand to be always available for the customer on a channel of choice always know your history and context don't force you to repeat yourself they won't always tell you what you want to hear because neither your favorite human know your favorite man should do that they'll tell you with clarity on a channel of choice and if you take these principles and dig them into technology AI has this unprecedented opportunity and that's what I wrote in the paper use AI to create human like highly intuitive highly pervasive experiences that we could not have delivered in the absence of AI this is the philosophical sort of bent with which we're using AI in the realm of customer experience a company is largest Cisco we're all this fits for you how it's carving decision making in these customer experiences of what you guys do talk to me about those pain points that I'm describing that drive me crazy Cisco obviously is the critical infrastructure for the AI age you need to first be being a complete embrace of this technology before you can propagate and go to your customers and talk about it even beyond customer experience in the area of product development efficiency collaboration but have you we have completely embraced an AI native working approach as it comes to customer experience itself our belief is very foundational we have a platform which allows you to communicate with your customers bidirectionally on any channel of choice voice messaging what have you we are seeing this evolution of agents in the front end of that conversation that we've wrote written in the paper called concierge agents which is agents that can essentially be the face of the conversation between the brand and the customer and the reason it's called a concierge agent is because it's able to lose some highly intuitive highly intelligent things in the background it is able to converse with other sub agents first party and third party interoperate with them get the context orchestrate certain actions but for you the customer it is like every single time I call this brand or what have you I feel like I'm having a conversation with the brand as opposed to department X or department Y or Z for us the big big big evolution that I think Cisco's embraced is the emergence of these concierge agents which become the face of the brand and mask all the complexity for the end customer delivered truly elevated experience because earlier even with the human in the loop you'd have to essentially say let me call this department or let me transfer you or stay listen to Mozart's symphony for the next 15 minutes all of these things would happen because you are tracking down an individual who's sitting in some office somewhere who's the sole owner of that knowledge and I think AI is allowing us to break down these silos and really allow for this continuous conversational experience to happen extremely bullish about it via in-house users of it too so for our own support teams we use our contact center AI dog fooding it is the best way to get the freshness in it you've spoken to Arnav before and Arnav insists that it's not eating your dog food it's drinking your own champagne you said something that just unlocked something from my brain in the way it works these agents taking on the persona of the brand when I think of branding and marketing and like you think of tone and manner and colors but it's really interesting and fascinating now that we have this age of AI this artificial intelligence that can speak and write do all of these things and what personality it can take on how that is actually a huge part of the brand experience these branded agents so to speak they're obviously doing these tasks to make the customer experience positive every brand has a little bit of a different persona different edge they're helpful they're innovative they're edgy it's fascinating to me to think about how you could program the AI in a way to live and breathe that brand absolutely right there may be 10 companies in a space and each has a value you may have airlines with say cheapest fare but no frills and they may have full service airlines with say I'm going to give you this red carpeted white glove kind of service and all interfaces into the brand should reflect that reality that kind of customization is important but there are two parts should one is how do you present which is does this sound like my brand is it in the style and the theme and whatever of my brand but to form real oil beyond that does this brand know me and does it care about me and we've often spoken about what I mentioned earlier which is the importance of context when you invest in technologies below the island which you don't notice but which deliver intuitively great experiences you have to get to the brand is higher and I'll take an example on a no-name basis with a customer and they came on stage at one of my events and actually spoke about this and they eventually spoke about a simple fact that somebody was calling in to reschedule an appointment and they said no problem I'll reschedule the appointment and said great can I get a reason filling up reason for why people reschedule and they did and they said I need to visit my brother who has an illness let's call it cancer and so obviously the agent did what it explained the agent to do I'm sorry to hear about that I'll reschedule but as the conversation on the agent did what you'd expect an empathetic human to do which is I hope your brother feels better and small it seems insignificant but it still retains the humanity of the conversation and I think brands that consistently show up in caring about their customer it is a small moments where you build lasting relationships like we have a demo that we showed everybody which is someone calls in and the AI agent says hey Carlos thanks for calling in hope your back is feeling better and he says no actually I'm calling up about that because you know it still hurts and I need to get in touch with the doctor and I think that along with the front end personalization which is brand specific adding the element of humanity and context and what's relevant for the customer I think truly helps a brand stand out for what it's supposed to mean in a customer's life 100% hey guys if you've ever built a website before you know how quickly you can turn into a time suck recently I've been playing around with Wix's new hybrid editor called Wix Harmony you basically start by telling it what you're trying to build you prompt it to generate a professional grade site just like you want it and here's the part I like you can easily go back and forth between AI and hands-on editing whenever you want the AI agent Arya is an expert in website design and business you can answer questions or perform direct actions throughout the process which has been huge for me when I'm trying to perfect the look of my website they've also got built-in tools for selling bookings and marketing pretty much all the stuff you actually need once the site's live you're building anything right now a side project brand business whatever Wix Harmony honestly makes it easier to get out of your own way and start making stuff happen go to wix.com backslash harmony that's wix.com backslash harmony start your website today you mentioned multi agent and the collaborative exchange that they can have what does that unleash as far as what's possible in customer experience with that capability that is the question of our time we had conversation agents for the last decade we've been playing around with this NLU-based agents it barely got your numbers right and it's a you said five and it says why and you're like fighting with the agent and then you had task agents task agents just do work for example on a Wix platform you have a note-taker agent or a recording agent or a transcription agent it just does a job till you ask it to stop or in some cases you ask it to start it just does the job then you had conversational agents that met these task agents and now you could talk about something and it gets it done for example reschedule my appointment my pharmacy prescription refill or what have you but these are all straight line this is not agent agent take is essentially like you and I having a conversation wherein in a human world if you're best friends I'm like hey Ryan I'm out today can you help me with this go home can you do this the keys under the mat check if this is possible if it's not there so it's a set of things wherein at some point in time you know me enough to say fine if I don't find the key there what am I supposed to do in an AI agent world it involves as I said the concierge agent owning the conversation between brand and customer and then taking what the customer saying it can be 10 requests it's not one intent it you may be asking me for something which allows me to check for a dependency and now this concierge agent takes what the customer's saying and starts to parse it for what the customer wants and may have to go to multiple subsystems to find out for example hey can you please check if I can fly first class to Japan now like great I need to check for your rolling grade are you allowed let's assume the company's policy is there and next how many hours is the policy let's say there's a check on do you have budget if both are true do you have budget and it may have to go to different systems and then go to this travel portal and book this ticket and you know what only book it if it is less than $2,000 let's assume you've given this complex set of asks now you may need to wait and you say I have to the end of the week to book it might run successive things to see the fair drops or there's a promo or something is happening so this task execution window is very very long it's not that discouragement appointment and the task is done you've given a very complex command to this agent it is not able to execute it itself it has to go to multiple sub agents some system has to thread the context between these and ultimately come back and tell you when the job is done that is where agents are evolving wherein they're able to hold a conversation with you across multiple contexts orchestrate the action of multiple sub agents keep that task execution window open for a very long period of time and make trade-offs and downstream decisions basis some guardrails and rules of course and get the job done you will see this huge shift away from task execution the jobs getting done that will be the true unlock of what I call agent xx should everybody fear in their jobs for no how many times you answer this a week I'm just going to get it out of the way because somebody is going to say why didn't you ask if he's taking all the jobs I'm just going to go there I've heard a couple of people decidedly spotted in me say a couple of things that I whole auditely agree with one is in a personal space what I tell myself is there's a lesser chance of air taking my job than a better air-powered human taking my job I'm definitely in a full embrace of AI and my own personal jobs I don't want to make a broad statement on humanity but in the customer experience realm itself we feel that humans essentially will become strategic problem solvers in random as to there's just an unbelievable amount of human productivity that is locked and capped in doing jobs and fast that don't need human cognition so if you were to unlock humans from doing for example password reset and just click this button check the status of my order and even do other complex stuff wherein a human has to wait on a line with another team for 30 minutes for them to come on line and then tell them can we do this or not AI can do all of this you can automate all of these flows the delta is if that is the case then what can and should the human be doing and we've said this often we've said this on stage which is there's 8 billion people in the planet we see AI as having the potential to 10x the productivity of the human race and this is what happened with the industrial revolution instead of hammering everything with your hand mass hammer this with a mechanical device what more could you produce and every single time a technology has come to humanity which allows for this absolutely exponential unlock of productivity we've only become better we've produced more increase the gross domestic output and just become better off as it is i'm a huge optimist on that front and in the customer experience around it will take away downstream work but it'll make the humans who are in the loop much more valuable and very very critical a subject matter experts and overseers in this new customer experience around my you talk about the end of cx silos talk to me about what that means and speaking this common language needing to speak a common language and what's broken today the broken experience is because either system data is siloed or systems are siloed or the front ends are siloed in many cases all three for example the system that messages you that your payment is due is offer for messaging platform you may have some cpass platform it generates automated alerts that hey one day is your payment you here's your reminder when that happens you have a question which is okay i don't have the nine hundred dollars to pay can i break it up into installments without accruing interest that becomes a support query now you realize that message was one way message and it's broken so i need to now call one eight hundred what have you to ask you that is possible and then that team says hang on let me check your eligibility word if you bring all of this together wherein you get a message it says your payment is due you have a question which is kind of break it up into how long can i break it up to get interest free installments and am i eligible the ability to respond back to that same message on the same channel in that same context get your answers so what started as a notification which is more compliance becomes a support query and then turns out for your profile we actually have a 12 month zero interest offer or a two percent interest of whatever the number is that would have been on some other day a phone call from a call center to you saying here and looks like you've got 10,000 outstanding on your card do you want a zero interest payment that's a sales exercise all these three happened in the same conversation on the same channel starting from one context AI and bringing the context together is allowing us to do that and i think that is what the great unlock is and because of our ability to function call these backend systems and all of that we are able to do this historically they were harder to do that said organizations do need to solve the data out of the pyramid first because if a data is completely siloed your systems access and not opened up using protocols like mcp then it will be very hard to bring these agent picker experiences to life venod chief friction killer of cisco i always make up titles for my guess is there a specific place where people can find you on social or things like that it's venod underscore cc on x venod m christian on linden but we will definitely drop in the links to some of these at the end of the show we'll have all of those in the show notes and really appreciate the fascinating discussion there's a lot there's so much happening in this space and venod and the team at cisco are right at the forefront really appreciate you for coming on a sharing perspective or note thank you so much for having me ryan i do appreciate the opportunity thank you ryan is right dot com that's the website that's where you'll see the full episode highlight clips all the information and links to venod's information and his paper and everything cisco's up to have links to some of their programs and different things that they want to share will have all of that for easy access in the show notes and the website hey all this stuff is here all this stuff is now and we got the chief friction killer always telling us what's up we appreciate him we'll see you next time on right about now this has been right about now with ryan altered a radcast network production visit ryan is right dot com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities thanks for listening