This AI Will Handle 68% of Customer Support by 2028 — and It’s Smarter Than You Think
San Jose, CA – May 27, 2025—Cisco revealed a major study that will set a tectonic shift in customer service delivery: By 2028, 68% of all customer service and support interactions with technology vendors will be agentic AI-powered.
Titled, The Race to an Agentic Future, the study surveyed 7,950 global business and technical decision-makers from 30 different countries. It showed great support from companies for the rise of AI-led experiences. With 92% of respondents stating support and services as mission-critical in today’s IT landscape, demands for proactive, personalized, and predictive service models are growing.
The transformation brought by agentic AI—an evolutionary-tipped category of artificial intelligence where the system can be autonomous, context-aware, and capable of taking independent action in the customer experience lifecycle. Traditional AI and rule-based automation can’t claim this: agentic AI supports real-time decision-making and continuous learning, cutting down human intervention and complex workflows.
Amazingly, more than half (56%) of respondents said that their interactions with vendors would be agentic AI-driven within the next year. Still, the study warns that many tech vendors are not ready. Organizations that do not embrace agentic AI risk reputational damage, diminishing trust, and higher customer churn.
Liz Centoni, EVP & Chief Customer Experience Officer, Cisco, commented: “With agentic AI reaching a new level of maturity, we’re closer than ever to solving some of the most persistent customer pain points in enterprise environments. For instance, a significant share of network issues stem from misconfiguration, something agentic systems are poised to eliminate. That shift will lead to smarter networks, stronger security, and more productive teams. As an industry, we’ve been talking about these concepts for decades, and while we’ve made incremental progress, AI – and especially agentic AI – is making that vision a reality.”
“We are drawing on four decades of data, our deep industry knowledge, and the trust of our customers to re-imagine Cisco Customer Experience as an agentic-led function. Our vision is to make every customer interaction with Cisco personalized, proactive, and predictive, and to make every customer feel like they are our only customer. And while we’re making meaningful progress, this new research makes one thing clear: we have to move faster,” she added.
While the benefits are clear, ranging from IT productivity gains to cost savings and enhanced strategic alignment, respondents emphasized that AI must complement human connection. A striking 96% said human relationships remain essential in B2B partnerships, while 99% demand ethical governance frameworks.
As AI races ahead, Cisco is calling on the tech industry to act decisively and ethically—before the agentic future arrives without them.
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