Announcing the general availability of Webex AI Agent: paving the way for new era of CX

Creating and delivering remarkable customer experiences (CX) with consistency is crucial to fostering strong relationships in today’s market, though many organizations struggle to keep pace with rising demands. Many of us know the frustration of reaching a dead end in customer service, with no option to reach an actual human representative. Traditional, rigid chatbots often fall short, wasting time, causing multiple call transfers, and requiring customers to repeat information.

Data shows that your customers want more from self-service. A recent study on changing customer expectations showed that while 59% of consumers find current self-service bots inadequate, 94% are open to using them if they offer personalized, efficient, and natural interactions.

We’re excited to announce that Webex AI Agent will be generally available (GA) on March 31, 2025. We believe that this solution is essential to help address the challenges that plague CX today.

Meet the all-new Webex AI Agent

Our solution to these challenges is Webex AI Agent, an intelligent solution that can answer inquiries and fulfill customer intents across a wide range of channels, all while delivering personalized, natural interactions.

Imagine engaging in a digital or voice interaction that feels as natural and intuitive as speaking to a real person—someone who truly understands your request and effortlessly resolves it. Autonomous agents built on Webex AI Agent use LLMs and Generative AI to understand the intent of your customer’s message, make an immediate decision, and then take appropriate action to resolve their query in real time.

Webex AI Agent can seamlessly adapt to your customers’ changing preferences mid-conversation and even remember the details of their issue while switching between topics – so your customer never has to repeat themselves.

Moreover, Webex AI Agent helps you streamline operations by offering 24/7 service and reducing the volume of incoming inquiries to your contact center agents. This frees them to dedicate more quality time to assisting customers with complex requests. It also allows you to allocate agents more efficiently and reduce agent stress, which leads to job dissatisfaction and high turnover.

Intuitively design AI agents

Most self-service solutions are difficult to build and deploy. However, with its user-friendly, low-code/no-code design tool, Webex AI Agent Studio allows business users to create and manage voice or digital self-service workflows. Both business users and IT professionals can develop AI agents that work alongside human agents for specific routine or high-volume use cases.

Integrating the Webex AI Agent with critical business applications like CRM, ERP, and HR platforms is straightforward. By connecting to your existing business workflows and back-end systems, the Webex AI Agent can fulfill requests instantly, whether rescheduling an appointment, booking a flight, or anything in between.

Additionally, with the flexibility to use existing knowledge bases, upload files, or create new ones directly in the Studio, AI Agents can become instant experts in your business.

Balance different modes tailored to your business needs

Organizations have the option to build AI agents as either scripted or autonomous experiences.

Autonomous agents use large language models (LLMs) to provide more conversational, personalized, and natural responses. They can be quickly configured to respond to a broad range of queries without extensive manual training and seamlessly transition between topics without losing the context of the conversation.

Businesses also have the flexibility to design scripted experiences if the organization is not quite ready to deploy fully autonomous generative AI. They provide highly controlled, deterministic and consistent responses.

Understanding key use cases – Oh the possibilities!

AI Agents can serve a wide range of use cases across any industry – so it can be hard for businesses to know where to start.

It’s essential that an AI agent fits naturally into your existing customer journeys and replaces any rigid tools that you may have in your current CX infrastructure. In customer service, this could mean replacing an existing IVR system to fulfil routine customer requests and deflect inquiries away from the contact center.

While there are suitable use cases across every vertical, many of our customers have initially leveraged AI Agents in Customer Service, Sales, HR, and IT to create efficiencies and test the capabilities of AI Agents.

Powerful benefits and rapid ROI.

Webex AI agent delivers powerful benefits and rapid ROI, including:

• Enhanced customer satisfaction: Providing 24/7 intuitive, natural interactions and seamless self-service experiences, increasing overall customer satisfaction.
• Improved first-contact resolution: Connecting with knowledge bases, business systems, and back-office workflows to resolve complex inquiries accurately on the first attempt.
• Cost efficiency: Expanding the use of automated and self-service interactions, reducing service costs associated with channels that have higher labor costs, such as phone and email.
• Reduced agent burnout: Alleviating pressure on contact center agents and automatically routes customers to other resources, helping prevent agent burnout, which often leads to turnover.
• Shorter wait times: Combining intelligent automation with real-time, intuitive engagement to provide immediate responses, reducing wait times, abandonment rates, and customer churn.
• Boosted operational efficiency: Supporting rapid development and scalable deployment, driving operational efficiency and accelerating time-to-value.

Businesses must leverage AI to embrace the evolution to an experience center.

The CX landscape is rapidly evolving to meet rising customer expectations. As a result, businesses also need to evolve their CX infrastructure to keep customers satisfied. Leveraging AI within customer service is an essential component of this evolution.

Despite technological advances, traditional contact centers are still primarily reactive tools for addressing customer inquiries. Many contact centers still rely on outdated back-end systems and disconnected data silos, making it difficult to deliver experiences that feel intuitive and connected across multiple channels.

To meet increasing customer expectations, contact centers must evolve into customer experience centers, where every interaction is an opportunity to solve a customer need.

With years of experience delivering CX solutions to Cisco customers, we’ve identified essential components needed to evolve traditional contact centers into experience centers:

• Anticipate customer needs: Proactively engage with your customers with automated, relevant communications.
• Build 24/7, always-on service: Provide support for your customers whenever they need it, with engaging AI interactions that feel natural.
• Automate intent fulfillment: Connect your CX tools to your essential backend systems, enabling intent realization that closes the loop on customer requests and prevents the need for escalation.
• Augment your workforce with AI: Unlock new efficiencies with AI-powered tools that empower customer-facing employees and leaders.
• Turn insights into action: Leverage robust analytics to understand customer needs and proactively address them.

While some organizations have adopted one or two of these elements, we’ve seen that the most effective approach is a holistic one, integrating all components to create thoughtful, effective, and human interactions.

Next steps?

When harnessed correctly, an AI-powered solution can turn a frustrating experience into a positive one. Webex AI Agent aims to revolutionize customer experiences by delivering seamless, efficient, and personalized self-service that enhances satisfaction while improving contact center performance.

When implemented strategically, AI solutions can drive rapid cost savings, boost productivity, and improve efficiency, often achieving a return on investment (ROI) in just months.

If you are ready to transform your customer experience in your enterprise, Contact us to learn more and experience the Webex AI Agent in action with a live demo.

Learn More:

• The Journey to Agentic AI
• Enterprise Connect Press Release
• Learn more about Webex AI Agent
• What’s New for Webex Customer Experience solutions