The contact center is being reinvented in the era of AI. The organizations navigating it best understand that great customer experience isn’t a series of disconnected touchpoints – it’s an orchestrated system of intelligence. At Cisco, that’s exactly what we’ve been building toward: redefining the contact center as a continuous, context-aware customer journey, built on an interoperable platform that combines the full Cisco stack with enterprise-grade security and AI — giving organizations the foundation to scale with confidence.
We know everyone is at a different stage of this shift — some piloting, some scaling, some still building the foundation. What we’re announcing this week at Cisco Live is built for all of them: purposeful innovation that empowers the agentic workforce, elevates customer experience, and delivers both operational excellence and stronger customer outcomes.
Built from the ground up: AI Workforce Engagement Management (AI WEM)
AI cannot reach its full potential when it is bolted onto systems that were built for another era. What we’ve been building is different. We’re not adding AI to the contact center, we’re rebuilding the contact center around AI, with orchestration, context, and interoperability as foundational infrastructure, not an afterthought.
Nowhere is that more evident than how we are approaching workforce engagement. Managing a workforce of agents that includes both human and AI is a new operational challenge and most WEM tools simply weren’t built for it. They were designed for a world where every agent was human, every evaluation was manual, and coaching happened weeks after the fact based on a handful of sampled calls. That model doesn’t hold up anymore.
Webex AI WEM is built from the ground up for the blended workforce. It’s a fully native, end-to-end suite – no bolt-ons, no third-party integrations – covering everything from forecasting and scheduling to quality management, performance dashboards, real-time agent guidance, and AI-powered onboarding. Every capability works across both human and AI agents, so supervisors, operators, admins, and leaders always have a complete picture.
Here’s what’s included:
- Workforce Management: Forecasting, scheduling, and intraday management purpose-built for both human and AI agents. Predict interaction volume, model AI deflection, automate shift assignments, and manage real-time SLA risks from a single control plane. (Controlled Availability Q3 CY27)
- Quality Management: Automatically evaluates 100% of interactions across human and AI agents, delivering consistent, objective scoring in near real time. Surfaces personalized coaching recommendations, sentiment analysis, and interaction insights across every voice and digital channel. (Human agent QM available now. AI agent QM – GA Q3 CY26)
- Performance Management: Gives agents and supervisors a shared, transparent view of individual metrics alongside team benchmarks (GA Q4 CY26). Includes wellbeing nudges triggered by real-time workload monitoring and gamification to keep teams motivated and engaged (Available now)
- AI-Powered Assist: Delivers contextual, in-the-moment guidance to agents during live interactions, helping them resolve issues faster and more consistently. Gives supervisors, analysts, and QM leads the ability to explore trends, ask questions, and receive targeted action recommendations before issues escalate (Available now)
- Powered Onboarding: Uses a Webex AI Training Agent to place new hires into realistic, dynamic practice scenarios — including challenging customer personas — before they ever take a live call. Instant scoring and feedback means agents learn faster and arrive ready (GA Q4 CY26)
AI Concierge: One Continuous Conversation, Hyper-Personalized for Every Customer
AI Concierge for CX (Customer Experience) is a pre-configured, extensible AI Agent that acts as brand’s front door, seamlessly orchestrating across knowledge bases, other AI agents, and enterprise systems – delivering one fluid, hyper-personalized conversation for every customer. It features enhanced voice capabilities, deeper context awareness, persistent AI memory across human and AI interactions, and multi-agent orchestration so that no matter how a customer reaches you or how many handoffs happen along the way, their experience feels like one continuous conversation, not a series of fresh starts.
Enterprises can further configure it in the AI Agent Studio with their brand’s knowledge, actions, and workflows instead of building a custom experience from scratch.
AI Agents for Collaboration: One place to build, manage and deploy agents
Speaking of the AI Agent studio, Webex is transforming enterprise engagement by extending our comprehensive, secure AI Agent platform for our entire Collaboration portfolio. Organizations can now effortlessly create everything from pre-configured self-service workflows to highly customized agents that span collaboration and third-party channels in one place. The ability to build, deploy, and manage voice and digital, multi-modal AI agents across, any internal or external use case, allows IT and admins to ensure consistency across all AI agents.
AI Agent 360: Security and performance tracking backed by Cisco
Building AI agents is one thing. Knowing how they’re performing in the real world and catching problems before your customers do – that’s the harder part. Autonomy without accountability is liability. As AI agents take on more consequential work, the question isn’t just whether they’re capable – it’s whether they’re acting as intended, and whether they’re protected from being manipulated. That’s where real-world visibility and proactive safeguards become non-negotiable.
AI Agent 360 addresses that directly. It brings together Cisco’s observability, security, and AI management capabilities into a single control plane across the AI agent’s entire lifecycle. You can build, test, monitor, and optimize AI agents in real time, with the enterprise-grade AI security and observability that Cisco has enabled across the AI infrastructure. Because AI applications cannot run effectively without a full suite of observability and security embedded – not bolted on after the fact, but present from the first deployment.
Accelerating market access: Webex Contact Center Now Generally Available in India
In April 2026, we announced the general availability of Webex Contact Center in India — hosted in a dedicated local data center in Mumbai and I want to take a moment to underscore why this matters.
India is one of the world’s most significant and sophisticated contact center markets. Enterprises operating there face a uniquely demanding combination of scale, regulatory complexity, and customer expectation. By bringing Webex Contact Center to local infrastructure in Mumbai, we’ve made it possible for Indian enterprises and multinationals to access our full AI-native platform all within a security framework built for the Indian regulatory landscape.
This launch also builds on the foundation we established with Webex Calling in India, creating a unified ecosystem that breaks down silos between internal teams and customer-facing agents, ultimately strengthening our end-to-end story in one of the most important markets in the world.
Innovation Doesn’t Stop at the Cloud: What’s New for On-Premises Cisco Contact Center
We believe deeply in meeting customers where they are, with the flexibility and choice that best fits their needs. For our on-premises contact center customers, the pace of AI innovation has been significant, and we’ve made sure that momentum reaches them too.
Webex AI Agent is now generally available for on-premises contact centers, bringing the same intelligent, conversational AI capabilities to customers running Contact Center Enterprise (CCE) environments.
We’ve also introduced Universal Harness for On-Premises, which simplifies AI orchestration through a single on-premises integration layer that unifies APIs, SDKs, and authentication, enabling teams to focus less on infrastructure and more on innovation. This capability allows enterprises to host and integrate third-party AI models locally, giving organizations with strict data sovereignty and compliance requirements the flexibility to bring their own AI without sacrificing control. With our most recent release (Release 15), on-premises customers gain access to a robust suite of AI capabilities, including AI Assistant functionality, helping modernize a platform originally built for a world that no longer exists.
Our commitment to on-premises customers is simple: you shouldn’t have to choose between where you run your infrastructure and what’s possible with AI. Both are available to you today.
Come see us in Las Vegas
This is the agentic era of customer experience. And we’re just getting started.
If you’re here with us this week, I’d encourage you to join our Keynote Deep Dive and PSO sessions to hear more about these exciting announcements. And if you want to go deeper, join us for our technical breakouts and various hands-on labs. Check out the full session catalog here.
Come find us in the World of Solutions, where we’ll have live demos run by the experts. Don’t miss our beloved Cisco Café and Quiet Cube to try Webex AI Agent for yourself.
For the full list of Webex innovations, check out our What’s New Page.
Enjoy this event and have a great time in Las Vegas. We look forward to seeing you at WebexOne 2026, this year in Austin, TX from Oct 5-8th.
Many of the products and features mentioned are still in development and will be made available as they are finalized, subject to ongoing evolution in development and innovation. The timeline for their release is subject to change.
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