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Наталя ХандусенкоAI Eng
29 May 2026, 13:05
2026-05-29
"Surgery without anesthesia": Cisco compares AI implementation to surgical intervention for profit
When a leader has to integrate AI into a giant global company with tens of thousands of employees spread across offices around the world, discomfort is inevitable. The process can be compared to “surgery without anesthesia,” says Cisco’s director of customer experience, Liz Centoni. Her unit, which has nearly 20,000 employees, is currently undergoing a transformation into an AI-powered services organization. “It’s painful,” the top manager admitted to Business Insider.
When a leader has to integrate AI into a giant global company with tens of thousands of employees spread across offices around the world, discomfort is inevitable. The process can be compared to “surgery without anesthesia,” says Cisco’s director of customer experience, Liz Centoni. Her unit, which has nearly 20,000 employees, is currently undergoing a transformation into an AI-powered services organization. “It’s painful,” the top manager admitted to Business Insider.
Cisco develops networking, security, and collaboration technologies for businesses, including routers, switches, cybersecurity tools, and services that help connect and protect enterprise IT systems. That's why our customer support team is vital to your business.
According to Liz Centoni, integrating AI required more than just “laying it on top of old workflows. Cisco had stepped on this rake before, before realizing that this approach only made inefficient processes run faster.
One such example was customer support.
Cisco initially used generative AI to generate reports when one support engineer transferred a case to another—due to a shift change, workload, or the need for different expertise. The goal was to give engineers more context. But, Centoni says, that only “started to annoy our customers more quickly” because it made the transfer of cases more efficient, but it didn’t solve the underlying problem.
“The end goal was never to just hand over the ticket,” she said. “The goal was, how do you get the customer to the right engineer right away?”
This realization led Cisco to completely redesign its workflow. They implemented “intelligent routing” to route requests to the right person from the start. Cisco’s customer experience division receives about 1.5 million calls a year, and now, according to Centoni, nearly 88 percent of them are routed to the right engineer the first time.
The company now measures the effectiveness of customer support by the number of calls that require only one — or no — transfer between specialists.
According to Centoni, artificial intelligence is best integrated into repetitive workflows that can be performed autonomously with over 90% accuracy.
The company recently launched Cisco IQ, a digital interface for support and professional services. Centoni said the tool is “designed to be a single source of truth for customers to solve their most common problems.” She added that the platform helps detect and prevent system failures, frees employees from excessive “data analysis” in favor of real-world action, and reduces the number of tedious support calls.
For Centoni, the key success criterion for any AI project is not just about improving efficiency. She emphasizes that each initiative must clearly demonstrate what routine work it will eliminate, as well as whether it can increase revenue, improve margins, build customer trust, or help teams create the products of the future.
