Like many other vendor events in the customer service and experience space, there were numerous announcements at Cisco’s recent WebexOne event in San Diego.

Here are the headlines that stood out for me:

• Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, highlighted in his opening keynote that Cisco provides the critical infrastructure for the AI era and has security, privacy, and resilience baked into all of their products. This is a message that will resonate with many leaders considering the adoption of AI-powered products within an enterprise setting.
• Patel went on to talk about their People to People (P2P), People to AI (P2AI), and AI to AI (AI2AI) collaboration framework, which provides a straightforward and elegant description of the future landscape we are standing at the edge of and how organizations should be thinking about organizing work and how work should be done.
• Building on that, they announced new agentic capabilities that shift the use of AI from simply providing answers to one where autonomous agents can work together to achieve a specified outcome.
• This was further enhanced by the announcement that they now operate as an open platform and that their AI Agents can now interact with third-party systems as well as other AI agents through open protocols. The potential of this was demonstrated by the partnerships they announced with Zoom, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce, among others, at the event.
• Given their new agentic and open approach, the announcement of their AI-powered Quality Management product for their cloud-based contact center suite, which provides oversight and insight into the quality of outcomes delivered by both human and AI agents, was an exciting development and evidence of their collaborative approach in action.
• And, finally, there would have been something missing from the event if they didn’t announce a slew of new AI agents. Here are three that stood out for me:
  • An AI agent capable of transcribing and summarising face-to-face meetings in real time to capture the value of those meetings, impromptu huddles, and brainstorming sessions (Notetaker agent).
  • An AI agent capable of automatically arranging meetings (Meeting scheduler), and
  • An always-on, virtual receptionist for Webex Calling that can automate routine queries, respond to customer questions, and complete tasks like transferring calls or scheduling appointments (AI receptionist).

However, among all the announcements, one in particular caught my attention. That was the announcement that they were continuing to develop their on-premise contact center solution and were bringing the latest AI features and functionality to that suite.

Why did it resonate?

Well, despite the rhetoric that everyone is moving to the cloud, that the cloud is better, more advanced, and seems to be where all the good stuff is happening, many customers are simply not ready to make that move and may never be ready.

I mean, if you are a brand that operates across multiple countries and continents and has to deal with different legal, regulatory, data, and security environments, then operating solely in the cloud may not be possible, practical, or even preferable.

Recent research from Metrigy, a research and advisory firm, backs this up. Their research finds that nearly half of the world’s largest companies still utilise on-premise contact center platforms. Additionally, they found that the main reasons organizations keep their contact center on-premise include security (59%), reliability (57%), cost advantages (53%), and control over technology customization (43%).

So, while some platform providers are either not offering it, downplaying its importance, or no longer supporting their legacy applications, it’s refreshing to hear that Cisco is not only developing its AI and cloud-based solutions but is also continuing to improve their on-premises contact centre solutions and incorporating the latest AI features and functionality into them, ensuring on-premises customers don’t miss out on the newest innovations.

That seems pretty customer-centric to me, and they should be applauded for that, particularly if security and reliability are an organization’s primary concerns.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

Credit: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash