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Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
How Cisco Is Using AI Concierge Agents to Reinvent Customer Experience | Vinod Muthukrishnan
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- [00:01]
Grainger Announcer
If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [01:00]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
We see AI as having the potential to 10x the productivity of the human race. And this is what happened with the industrial Revolution. Instead of hammering everything with your hand Mars hammer this with a mechanical device. What more could you produce? And every single time a technology has come to humanity which allows for this absolutely exponential unlock of productivity, we've only become better. We've produced more, increased the gross domestic output and just become better off as it is. I'm a huge optimist on that front.
- [01:28]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Intro/Outro)
This is Right about now with Ryan Alford A Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.
- [01:50]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
What's up guys? Welcome. Right about now we're always talking about how and what and where and why you can get right in business. Now we're going to one of the biggest tech companies on the planet. It is Cisco. Talking with Vinod Muthakrishnan, the VP General Manager of WebEx Customer Experience and thanks for having me.
- [02:09]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Super excited to be here.
- [02:11]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
I hear about AI all the time, but I don't hear it talked about customer terms in the experience and how it's changing interfaces. Interface isn't always technology. It's sort of the how the customer experience had in any exchange of information. You've got some thoughts on this. You put a nice paper together which I really appreciate your insights on. Talk to me about what's happening in this crazy Advancing world we live in.
- [02:35]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
The great thing about being in the customer experience business is you're trying to make your own lives as a customer better. There's some ulterior motives to doing this job, and I've always said this, it's an important statement to take away. A lot of technology principles are driven by one very simple quest. The quest is the purpose of AI and automation in our industry should be to make customer experience more human and not less so. It seems counterintuitive and analogy we often give is imagine engaging with your favorite human, any human. You know the fact that the context changes because one day, for example, Ryan, if you and I were besties, let's say we went to a ball game last week and then now you're here trying to record a podcast. I haven't forgotten the fact that we went to a ball game last week. The context may have changed, but I haven't forgotten what happened last time or the one before that, or that you launched a new show or what have you. And conversation between you and your favorite human, usually irrespective of channel modality point in time, the interval between them, lose context. It feels like one continuous conversation between two humans. But you take that to the world of customer experience. That is not how you engage with your favorite brand. Every time you call in, it's like Groundhog Day. You're calling in all the context wiped clean. Sometimes when you're transferred, the context is lost. It's really a disconnected experience. If you message in a new call that is lost. The reason I say that is when you look at AI and you break that onto functional terms, this is the experiential gap we need to fix. We want like your favorite human for a brand to be always available for the customer on a channel of choice. Always know your history and context. Don't force you to repeat yourself. They won't always tell you what you want to here because neither your favorite human nor your favorite man should do that. They'll tell you with clarity on a channel of choice. And if you take these principles and bake them into technology, AI has this unprecedented opportunity. And that's what I wrote in the paper. Use AI to create human like highly intuitive, highly pervasive experiences that we could not have delivered in the absence of AI. This is the philosophical sort of bent with which we're using AI in the realm of customer experience.
- [04:24]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Intro/Outro)
If you're an H Vac technician and a call comes in, Grainger knows that you need a partner that helps you find the right product. Fast and hassle free. And you know that when the first problem of the day is a clanking blower motor, there's no need to break a sweat. With Grainger's easy to use website and product details, you're confident you'll soon have everything humming right along. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [04:57]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
A company as large as Cisco where all this fits for you, how it's carving decision making in these customer experiences of what you guys do. Talk to me about those pain points that I'm describing that drive me crazy.
- [05:10]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Cisco obviously is the critical infrastructure for the AI age. You need to first be be in a complete embrace of this technology before you can propagate and go to your customers and talk about it. Even beyond customer experience in the area of product development, efficiency, collaboration, what have you, we have completely embraced an AI native working approach. As it comes to customer experience itself, our belief is very foundational. We have a platform which allows you to communicate with your customers bidirectionally on channel of choice, voice messaging, what have you. We are seeing this evolution of agents in the front end of that conversation that we've wrote, written in the paper are called concierge agents, which is agents that can essentially be the face of the conversation between the brand and the customer. And the reason it's called a concierge agent is because it's able to do some highly intuitive, highly intelligent things in the background. It is able to converse with other sub agents, first party and third party, interoperate with them, get the context, orchestrate certain actions. But for you, the customer, it is like every single time I call this brand or what have you, I feel like I'm having a conversation with the brand as opposed to department X or department Y or Z. For us, the big, big, big evolution that I think Cisco's embraced is the emergence of these concierge agents which become the face of the brand and mask all the complexity for the end customer, deliver truly elevated experience. Because earlier, even with the human in the loop, you'd have to essentially say let me call this department or let me transfer you or stay, listen to Mozart's Symphony for the next 15 minutes. All of these things would happen because you're tracking down an individual who's sitting in some office somewhere who's the sole owner of that knowledge. I think AI is allowing us to break down these silos and really allow for this continuous conversational experience to happen. Extremely bullish about it. We are in house users of it too. So for our own support teams, we use our contact center. Our AI Dog fooding it is the best way to get proficiency in it. You've spoken to Arna before and Arna insists that it's not eating your own dog food, it's drinking your own champagne.
- [07:00]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
You said something that just unlocked something for my brain and the way it works, these agents taking on the Persona of the brand. When I think of branding and marketing and like you think of tone and manner and colors. But it's really interesting and fascinating now that we have this age of AI, this artificial intelligence that can speak and write, do all of these things and what personality it can take on and how that is actually a huge part of the brand experience. These branded agents, so to speak, they're obviously doing these tasks to make the customer experience positive. Every brand has a little bit of a different Persona, different edge. They're helpful, they're innovative, they're edgy. It's fascinating to me to think about how you could program the AI in a way to live and breathe that brand.
- [07:47]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Absolutely right. There may be 10 companies in a space and each has a value. You may have airlines with, say, cheapest fare but no frills, and they may have full service airlines which say, I'm going to give you this red carpeted white glove kind of service. And all interfaces into the brand should reflect that reality. That kind of customization is important, but there are two parts. One is how do you present which is, does this sound like my brand? Is it in the style and the theme and what above my brand but to form real loyalty beyond that, does this brand know me and does it care about me? And we've often spoken about what I mentioned earlier, which is the importance of context. When you invest in technologies below the eyeline, which you don't notice, but which deliver intuitively great experiences, your affinity to the brand is higher. And I'll take an example on a no name basis with a customer. And they came on stage at one of our events and actually spoke about this. And they essentially spoke about a simple fact that somebody was calling in to reschedule an appointment and they said, no problem, I'll reschedule the appointment. And said, great. Can I get a reason, filling up reasons for why people reschedule? And they did. And they said, I need to visit my brother who has an illness, let's call it cancer. And so obviously the agent did what it expect the agent to do. I'm sorry to hear about that. I'll reschedule. But as the conversation wound on, the agent did what you'd expect an empathetic human to do, which is I hope your brother feels better. And small. It seems insignificant, but it still retains the humanity of the conversation. And I think brands that consistently show up in caring about their customer, it is the small moments where you build lasting relationships. Like we have a demo that we show to everybody, which is someone calls in and the AI agent says, hey Carlos, thanks for calling in, hope your back's feeling better. And he says, no, actually I'm calling up about that because, you know, it still hurts and I need to get in touch with the doctor. And I think that along with the front end personalization, which is brand specific, adding the element of humanity and context and what's relevant for the customer, I think truly helps a brand stand out for what it's supposed to mean in the customer's life.
- [09:32]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
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- [10:49]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
That is the question of our time. We had conversational agents for the last decade we've been playing around with these NLU based agents. It barely got your numbers right and it said, you said five and it says why? And you're like fighting with the agent and then you had task agents. Task agents just do work. For example on a webex platform you have a note taker agent Or a recording agent or a transcription. It just does a job till you ask it to stop. Or in some cases, you ask it to start. It just does the job. Then you had conversational agents that met these task agents and now you could talk about something and it gets it done. For example, reschedule my appointment, my pharmacy prescription refill, or what have you. But these are all straight line. This is not agentic. Agentic is essentially like you and I having a conversation wherein in a human world, if you have best friends, I'm like, hey, Ryan, I'm out today. Can you help me with this? Go home. Can you do this? The key is under the mat. Check if this is possible, if it's not there. So it's a set of things wherein at some point in time, you know me enough to say, okay, fine, if I don't find the key there, what am I supposed to do? In an AI agent world, it involves, as I said, the concierge agent owning the conversation between brand and customer and then taking what the customer is saying. It can be 10 requests, it's not one in 10. You may be asking me for something which allows me to check for a dependency. And now this concierge agent takes what the customer is saying and starts to parse it for what the customer wants and may have to go to multiple subsystems to find out. For example, hey, can you please check if I can fly first class to Japan now, like grid, I need to check for your role in grid. Are you allowed? Let's assume the company's policy is there. And next, how many hours is the policy? Let's say there's a check on do you have budget? If both are true, do you have budget? And it may have to go to different systems and then go to this travel portal and book this ticket. And you know what, only book it if it is less than $2,000. Let's assume you've given this complex set of asks. Now you may need to wait and you say, I have till the end of the week to book. It might run successive pings to see if the fare drops or there's a promo or something is happening. So this task execution window is very, very long. It's not that. Rescheduled my appointment and the task is done. You've given a very complex command to this agent. It is not able to execute it itself. It has to go to multiple sub agents. Some system has to thread the context between these and ultimately come back and tell you when the job is done. That is where agents are Evolving, wherein they're able to hold conversation with you across multiple contexts, orchestrate the action of multiple sub agents, keep that task execution window open for a very long period of time and make trade offs and downstream stream decisions, basis some guardrails and rules of course, and get the job done. You will see this huge shift away from task execution to jobs getting done. That will be the true unlock of what I call Agent X.
- [13:17]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
Should everybody be fearing their jobs? Vinod, how many times you answer this a week? I'm just going to get it out of the way because somebody's going to say, well why didn't you ask them if it's taking all the jobs? I'm just going to go there.
- [13:28]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
I've had a couple of people decidedly smarter than me say a couple of things that I wholeheartedly agree with. One is in a personal space. What I tell myself is there's a lesser chance of AI taking my job than a better AI powered human taking my job. I'm definitely in a full embrace of AI in my own personal jobs. I don't want to make a broad statement on humanity, but in the customer experience realm itself, we feel that humans essentially will become strategic problem solvers and brand ambassadors. There's just an unbelievable amount of human productivity that is locked and capped in doing jobs and tasks that don't need human cognition. So if you were to unlock humans from doing, for example, password resets and just click this button, check the status of my order, and even do other complex stuff wherein a human has to wait on a line with another team for 30 minutes for them to come online and then tell them can we do this or not? AI can do all of this. You can automate all of these flows. The delta is, if that is the case, then what can and should the human be doing? And we've said this often, we've said this on stage, which is there's 8 billion people on the planet. We see AI as having the potential to 10x the productivity of the human race. And this is what happened with the Industrial Revolution. Instead of hammering everything with your hand, mass hammered this with a mechanical device. What more could you produce? And every single time a technology has come to humanity which allows for this absolutely exponential unlock of productivity, we've only become better, we've produced more, increased the gross domestic output and just become better off as it is. I'm a huge optimist on that front and in the customer experience realm. It will take away downstream work, but it'll make the humans who are in the Loop much more valuable and very, very critical subject matter Experts overseers in this new customer experience around Mafia.
- [15:07]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
You talk about the end of CX silos, talk to me about what that means and speaking this common language, needing to speak a common language and what's
- [15:17]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
broken today, the broken experience is because either data is siloed or systems are siloed or the front ends are siloed. In many cases all three. For example, the system that messages you that your payment is due is off of a messaging platform. You may have some CPAPAT SaaS platform. It generates automated alerts that hey Monday, is your payment due? Here's your reminder. When that happens, you have a question which is okay, I don't have the $900 to pay. Can I break it up into installments without accruing interest? That becomes a support query. Now you realize that message was one way message and it's broken. So I need to now call 1-800-What have you to ask you if that is possible. And then that team says hang on, let me check your eligibility word. If you bring all of this together wherein you get a message, it says your payment is due, you have a question which is can I break it up into how long can I break it up to get interest free install and am I eligible? The ability to respond back to that same message on the same channel in that same context, get your answers. So what started as a notification, which is more compliance becomes a support query and then turns out for your profile we actually have a 12 month 0 interest offer or a 2% interest of whatever that number is that would have been on some other day, a phone call from a call center to you saying hey Ryan, looks like you've got 10,000 outstanding on your card. Do you want a zero interest payment? That's a sales exercise. All these three happened in the same conversation on the same channel. Starting from one context AI and bringing the context together is allowing us to do that. And I think that is what the great unlock is. And because of our ability to function, call these backend systems and all of that, we are able to do this. Historically they were harder to do that. Said organizations do need to solve the data part of the pyramid first because if your data is completely siloed, your systems access are not opened up using protocols like mcp, then it'll be very hard to bring these agentic experiences to life.
- [16:58]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
Vinod Chief Friction Killer of Cisco I always make up titles for my guests. Is there a specific, specific place where people can find you on social or things like that.
- [17:10]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
It's Vinod underscore CC on X, Vinod M. Krishnan on LinkedIn. But we will definitely drop in the links to some of these at the end of the show.
- [17:18]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
We'll have all of those in the show notes and really appreciate it's a fascinating discussion. There's a lot. There's so much happening in this space and Vinod and the team at Cisco are right at the forefront. Really appreciate you for coming on and sharing perspective.
- [17:31]
Vinod Muthakrishnan
Renaud, thank you so much for having me. Ryan, I do appreciate the opportunity to you. Thank you.
- [17:36]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Interviewer)
Ryan is right.com that's the website. That's where you'll see the full episode highlight clips, all the information and links to the node's information and his paper and everything Cisco's up to. We'll have links to some of their programs and different things that they want to share. We'll have all of that for easy access in the show notes and the website. Hey, all this stuff is here, all this stuff is now. And we got the chief friction killer always telling us what's up. We appreciate him. We'll see you next time on Right about now.
- [18:06]
Ryan Alford (Podcast Host - Intro/Outro)
This has been Right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.
- [18:26]
Grainger Announcer
If you're the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, you know having a trusted person partner makes all the difference. That's why hands down, you count on Grainger for auto reordering. With on time restocks, your team will have the cut resistant gloves they need at the start of their shift and you can end your day knowing they've got safety well in hand. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. This is the story of the 1. As the purchasing manager at a manufacturing plant, she knows the only thing more important than having the right safety gear is having it there when you need it. That's why she partners with Grainger for auto reordering, so her team members can count on her to have cut resistant gloves on hand and each shift can run safely and efficiently. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgranger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.