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%
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 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