A new report from Cisco has highlighted the potential of agentic artificial intelligence to transform the way technology vendors deliver services and support to their customers.

Its latest research, “The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience,” surveyed nearly 8,000 global business and technical decision-makers across 30 countries.

Respondents predicted that agentic AI will play an increasingly prominent role in interactions with technology vendors over the coming years—and they’re positive about the benefits it’ll bring.

Specifically, 88% report they felt confident that the agentic AI-led customer experience provided by technology partners will help their organisation to achieve its goals. For instance, making their IT environments and operations more efficient, resilient, and secure; accelerating their most important strategic IT projects; and maximising value from their IT investments.

The respondents also expect the pivot to agentic AI-led customer experience to advance at a greater velocity than the industry anticipated. They predicted that 68% of their customer experience interactions with technology partners will be handled using agentic AI within the next three years, and also expect that more than half (56%) of interactions to be through agentic AI within the next 12 months.

When it comes to the implementation of this new technology, respondents were clear that they believe vendors who are left behind—or fail to deploy—agentic AI in an effective, secure, and ethical manner will suffer a deterioration in customer relationships, reputational damage, and higher levels of customer churn.

Further, respondents felt that vendors who embrace this transformation head-on, seamlessly, ethically, and across the technology lifecycle will benefit from data-driven insights, improved scalability within their support and services, and loyalty at scale. 81% of respondents predicted that vendors who successfully deliver agentic AI-led customer experience will gain a competitive edge.

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Speaking on agentic AI and its potential, Liz Centoni, who serves as EVP and chief customer experience officer at Cisco, said: “With agentic AI reaching a new level of maturity, we’re closer than ever to solving some of the most persistent customer pain points in enterprise environments.

“For instance, a significant share of network issues stem from misconfiguration, something agentic systems are poised to eliminate. That shift will lead to smarter networks, stronger security, and more productive teams. As an industry, we’ve been talking about these concepts for decades, and while we’ve made incremental progress, AI – and especially agentic AI – is making that vision a reality.”

Touching on Cisco’s own vision with agentic AI, Centoni added: “We are drawing on four decades of data, our deep industry knowledge, and the trust of our customers to re-imagine Cisco Customer Experience as an agentic-led function.

“Our vision is to make every customer interaction with Cisco personalized, proactive, and predictive, and to make every customer feel like they are our only customer. And while we’re making meaningful progress, this new research makes one thing clear: we have to move faster.”

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