In May, Cisco's plan to cut around 4,000 jobs and redirect resources towards AI raised a question about where customer experience fitted into the company's new strategy. Cisco's fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2026 results now offer some new evidence. Cisco's AI infrastructure business is booming. But one of the clearest indications of how the company is applying its wider agentic AI strategy comes from its own customer operations, where 145,000 support cases were resolved entirely by AI, with zero human intervention.
A Networking Supercycle, and What Drives It
According to Cisco's fourth-quarter and full-year results, revenue reached $17.3 billion, up 18 per cent year on year, taking full-year revenue to $63.3 billion, a 12 per cent increase. The company also reported $9.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders during fiscal 2026, including $4 billion in the fourth quarter, and expects $7.5 billion in AI infrastructure revenue in fiscal 2027.
Cisco believes agentic AI will help sustain that demand. In its prepared remarks for the call, Chuck Robbins, chair and chief executive of Cisco, said the accelerating adoption of agentic AI was fuelling a networking “supercycle”, as customers invest in Cisco's networking stack to manage increasing traffic and costs. Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, made a similar case in a LinkedIn post, writing: “As AI transitions from training massive LLMs to widespread agentic inferencing across cloud, sovereign, enterprise, and edge environments, high-performance networking and integrated security have become the core bottleneck.”
The Practical Example: Cisco's Own CX Operation
In the same remarks, Cisco said its use of generative and agentic AI across the customer experience organisation is accelerating quote turnaround and case resolution, and contributing to higher renewal rates. Separately, it disclosed that 145,000 support cases were resolved entirely by AI during FY 2026, with zero human intervention.
Cisco has not disclosed how it defines “zero human intervention”, or the complexity of the cases involved, so it is not a definitive measure of performance. Nevertheless, it puts a concrete number behind the broader argument that agentic AI is not only a networking opportunity for Cisco, but technology it is deploying inside its own operations.
Consistent With a Broader Product Direction
This internal deployment is consistent with Cisco's wider product direction. Its Webex AI Agent is designed to help customers resolve questions and fulfil their intent through autonomous or guided self-service, accessing tools, systems and experts when needed. Cisco introduced the product alongside AI Agent Studio in October 2024 and has continued to expand the approach, with its September 2025 Webex announcement describing AI Agent Studio as a central hub for building, managing and optimising AI agents. At Cisco Live in June, the company also introduced AI Concierge and AI Agent 360, extending that approach into customer journey continuity and visibility into AI agent performance.
So, Was CX Left Behind?
Since this question was asked a few months ago, CX has not emerged as a separate strategic pillar alongside networking and security. Instead, customer operations appear to be one of the places where Cisco is putting its wider agentic AI ambitions into practice. In that sense, CX may be becoming a meeting point between the infrastructure Cisco is building and the AI systems it expects that infrastructure to support.