Cisco used its annual Cisco Live US event in Las Vegas this week to unveil a series of updates to Webex Contact Center. This included a new AI agent designed to deliver continuous, personalised customer conversations; a governance and observability layer for AI agent performance; a native workforce management suite designed specifically for blended human and AI teams.
The releases were framed by Snorre Kjesbu, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Collaboration at Cisco, as part of what the company calls “Connected Intelligence”, which it describes as an architecture designed to close the distance between operators, users, and customers in an era where AI agents are already handling real interactions at scale.
AI Concierge: continuous conversations across channels
The most customer-facing of the three announcements is AI Concierge, a pre-configured and extensible AI agent built on the Webex AI Agent platform. According to Cisco, the agent is designed to eliminate the persistent frustration of context loss between interactions, delivering personalised conversations using AI memory and multi-agent orchestration, so that a customer’s history and intent carry forward across every channel and every session. AI Concierge is due to reach general availability in Q4 CY26.
The announcement positions Webex Contact Center alongside a growing number of vendors attempting to solve the continuity problem in customer service AI. Where many deployments still treat each interaction as a fresh start, Cisco’s approach is to make the conversation itself the persistent layer, with context surviving handoffs between agents, channels, and sessions.
AI Agent 360: visibility into the AI workforce
Running parallel to the customer-facing work is AI Agent 360, which addresses the operator’s challenge of understanding what AI agents are actually doing once deployed. Enhanced by AI Defense and Splunk, the capability provides real-time visibility into AI agent performance and behaviour across the full lifecycle. Cisco describes it as giving operators the ability to see what their agents are doing, how they are performing, and where they need correction. AI Agent 360 is entering beta in Q3 CY26.
The inclusion of Splunk and AI Defense signals that Cisco is positioning governance as infrastructure built into the platform from the start, not as a compliance layer added after the fact, but. For CX leaders managing a growing estate of AI agents across customer journeys, that distinction is becoming increasingly consequential.
Webex AI Workforce Engagement Management
The third announcement is Webex AI Workforce Engagement Management, a native suite that brings forecasting, scheduling, intraday management, AI quality management, and performance analytics together in a single environment. Cisco describes it as built from the ground up for a workforce that is part human and part AI, rather than adapted from tools designed for human-only teams. The suite is entering beta in Q2 CY26.
Most workforce management tools in the market were built for human agents and have been retrofitted to accommodate AI. Cisco’s claim, on the other hand, is that its suite is architected for the blended model as a starting assumption, which may prove a meaningful differentiator as AI agent volumes continue to grow.
A clearer CX identity at Cisco Live
The three announcements represent the most substantive Webex Contact Center news Cisco has brought to market in some time. Collaboration revenue fell one percent in Cisco's most recent quarter, and Webex received little mention across the entire earnings call, with no reference to Webex Contact Center, Webex AI Agent, or Webex Connect. These Cisco Live releases therefore carry extra significance as they could be taken as a renewed commitment to CX within a company whose strategic narrative is being shaped increasingly around infrastructure, silicon, and security, rather than customer-facing platforms.