Agentic AI is poised to take on a much more central role in the IT industry, according to a new report from Cisco.
The report, titled “The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience,” surveyed close to 8,000 business leaders across 30 countries, all of whom routinely work closely with customer service professionals from B2B technology services. In broad strokes, it paints a picture of a business landscape eager to embrace the rising wave of AI agents, particularly when it comes to customer service.
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As soon as next year, according to the report, over half (68%) of all customer service and support interactions with tech vendors could become automated, thanks to agentic AI. A striking 93% of respondents, furthermore, believe that this new technological trend will make these interactions more personalized and efficient for their customers.
Despite the numbers, customer service reps don’t need to worry about broad-scale job displacement just yet: 89% of respondents said that it’s still critical for humans to be in the loop during customer service interactions, and 96% stated that human-to-human relationships are “very important” in this context.
The rise of agents
The overnight virality of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked massive interest and spending in generative AI across virtually every industry. More recently, many business leaders have become fixated on AI agents – a subclass of models that blend the conversational ability of chatbots with a capacity to remember information and interact with digital tools, such as a web browser or a code database.
Big tech developers have been pushing their own AI agents in recent months, hoping these more pragmatic tools will set them apart from their competitors in an increasingly crowded AI space. At its annual developer conference last week, for example, Google announced the worldwide release (in public beta) of Jules, an agent designed to help with coding. Agents were also a major focus for Microsoft at its own developer conference, which was also held last week.
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The growing emphasis on agents within Silicon Valley’s leading tech companies is reverberating into a more general rush to deploy this technology. According to a recent survey of more than 500 tech leaders conducted by accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY), close to half of the respondents have begun using AI agents to assist with internal operations.
The clock is ticking
Against this backdrop of broad-scale adoption of agents, Cisco’s new report emphasizes the need for tech vendors to move quickly.
“Respondents are 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,” the authors noted.
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Conversely, 81% of respondents said that vendors who successfully incorporate agentic AI into their customer service operations will gain an edge over their competitors.
The report also found that despite all of the enthusiasm for AI-enhanced customer service interactions, there are still widespread concerns around data security. Almost every respondent (99%) said that as tech vendors embrace and deploy agents, they should also be building governance strategies and conveying these to their customers.
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