Cisco rolled out its first of many AI agents codeveloped with partner Mistral AI, a genAI and large language model (LLM) startup. The so-called AI Renewals Agent is an on-premise, AI-based application that Cisco’s internal Customer Experience (CX) group will use to help retain and renew customers more quickly.
The AI Renewals Agent gathers data from more than 50 different sources of structured and unstructured data and then offers real-time sentiment analysis, intelligent automation, and personalized recommendations tied to customer outcomes and key performance indicators (KPIs). Cisco predicts that the AI Renewal Agent could reduce the time its teams spend building a renewal proposal and preparing for a customer engagement by as much as 20%, and it expects that number will grow as the AI agent improves usage knowledge and more workflows are automated.
Cisco’s CX group provides customer product lifecycle management services and aims to ensure that customers get what they want out of their technology purchases. In addition to making sure customer networks, software and services are working as advertised, a key part of CX is to grow customer retention and bolster hardware and software sales.
Last year, Cisco and Mistral AI said they would collaborate to offer AI agents through Cisco’s Motific platform.
Motific is Cisco’s cloud-based service that gives enterprise customers a centralized hub for managing generative AI elements such as LLMs, security controls, APIs and more. The idea is to help streamline and accelerate the creation, deployment and management of generative AI-based applications for the enterprise, according to Cisco.
“Think of Motific as a one-stop shop where a ton of personas – large language models, ChatGPT etc. – come together with enterprise organization-specific policies and data sources to make it easier to create and deploy generative AI applications in a safe, secure manner,” said Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of Cisco’s advanced research outfit Outshift, in an interview with Network World when Motific was launched.