One way to look at the conclusion of a large global survey by Cisco on agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is that it will change everything — with the exception of the need for human interaction.
“Respondents believe that human relationships are, and will continue to be, hugely important in how their organizations engage with technology partners throughout the technology lifecycle,” according to the survey report. “They feel that personal relationships are vital for vendors to build trust and demonstrate reliability, drive customer satisfaction, optimize communication, and resolve issues in a timely way.”
The need for the human touch is extremely clear in the agentic AI survey response. Ninety-six percent of respondents reported that human relationships are very important when interacting with their technology partners.
Almost as many — 89% — reported that technology businesses must combine human empathy and connection with agentic AI efficiency to optimize customer experience. At the same time, the technology is not quite there yet, according to 76% of respondents.
The Cisco survey of almost 8,000 business and technical decision-makers came to two main conclusions beyond the need for humans to be involved:
- Agentic AI technology will become ubiquitous, according to the survey’s press release. Cisco believes that 68% of customer service and support interactions will be conducted using agentic AI by 2028. The survey found that 93% of respondents believe that agentic AI will enable technology vendors to deliver more personalized, proactive and predictive services. Fifty-six percent expect their customer experience interactions will be handled by agentic AI within a year and 68% within three years.
- People need to be careful. More than 99% of survey respondents said that organizations need to employ robust governance arrangements to deliver ethical use of agentic AI. There is a need for transparency, security, and a commitment to eliminating data bias.
The top ten AI-driven use cases for AI -powered customer experience to this point, according to Cisco, are customer insights and analytics; chatbots and virtual assistants for support; chatbots and virtual assistants for customer success; chatbots and virtual assistants for professional services; workflow automation; automated troubleshooting and diagnostics; predictive analytics for issue resolution; automated support ticket/support case systems; documentation generation; and recommendations for next best action.
In February, Anil Jain, the Global Managing Director, Strategic Consumer Industries at Google Cloud, told Telecompetitor that generative and agentic AI helps organizations by increasing efficiency, improving the customer experience, driving new revenue, and preventing customer churn.
