Cisco exec says adopting AI is like 'surgery without the drugs'

6 hours ago 6

When a corporate leader has to integrate AI into their giant global company with tens of thousands of employees scattered across offices around the world, there's probably going to be some discomfort.

Cisco's chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, described the process as "surgery without the drugs."

"It's painful," she told Business Insider.

Cisco makes networking, security, and collaboration technology for companies, including routers, switches, cybersecurity tools, and services that help connect and protect corporate IT systems. So its customer support team is essential.

Centoni, who leads Cisco's roughly 20,000-employee customer experience division, said she is now transforming it into an AI-native services organization.

She said that adopting AI has required more than simply bolting it onto old workflows — something Cisco tried before realizing it only made flawed processes move faster.

One example was customer support.

Cisco first used generative AI to create case summaries when one support engineer handed a case to another, whether because of a shift change, availability, or the need for different expertise. The goal was to give engineers more context. However, Centoni said it only "annoyed our customers faster," because it made handoffs more efficient but did not address the bigger issue.

"The outcome was never the handoff," she said. It was "how do I get to the right engineer the first time around?"

That realization pushed Cisco to redesign the workflow, using "intelligent routing" to send cases to the right expert from the start. Cisco's customer experience division gets about 1.5 million support cases a year, and now, nearly 88% are routed to the right engineer the first time, Centoni said.

A spokesperson for Cisco said the company now measures customer service success by the number of calls that require only one — or even zero — handoffs.

The best places to integrate AI, Centoni said, are in repeatable workflows that can be performed autonomously with more than 90% accuracy.

The company recently launched Cisco IQ, a digital interface for support and professional services that Centoni said is "designed as a single source of truth for customers to address recurring customer pain points." She said it helps detect preventable outages, redirects employees who spend too much time "interpreting data" rather than acting on insights, and reduces frustrating support calls.

For Centoni, the test for any AI project is not just whether it improves efficiency. She said each initiative has to show what work it will stop, and whether it can grow revenue, expand margins, deepen customer trust, or help teams build what comes next.