Cisco's VP of Webex CX discusses orchestrating AI-native contact centers, why “deflection” is the wrong metric, and what enterprise-grade really means in the age of agentic AI

In this CX Today interview, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, ahead of Cisco Live.

With a wave of major product announcements on the horizon, Vinod makes a compelling case that the contact center industry has reached a genuine inflection point; not just another AI upgrade cycle, but a ground-up reimagining of how humans, AI agents, and customers interact. If you're navigating AI adoption in CX, this one is worth your full attention.

The ‘AI experiment’ phase is over. Muthukrishnan argues that organizations have had enough time to tinker – and now the real work begins: making AI agents enterprise-grade, secure, and observable at scale. Here's what he unpacks:

Why ‘deflection’ is the wrong word, and the wrong goal: Vinod challenges the industry's obsession with point-in-time metrics, making the case that CX is a journey, not a transaction. Real success means CSAT that's neutral or better, resolution in the shortest time, and a customer who doesn't immediately ask for a human.

The trust gap in agentic AI: It's never been easier to build an AI agent... and never harder to make it safe. Vinod walks through Cisco's AI Agent 360: a framework combining custom guardrailing, red-teaming, runtime monitoring, and Splunk-powered observability to close that gap.

One experience, not one agent: Cisco's new agentic context engine aims to deliver continuous, memory-rich customer conversations across every touchpoint – so it always feels like picking up where you left off.

Workforce management, rebuilt: Cisco's new WEM suite is designed from the ground up for a workforce of both human and AI agents, because the 10-year-old model simply wasn't built for this.

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