{"slug": "cisco-exec-says-adopting-ai-is-like-surgery-without-the-drugs", "title": "Cisco exec says adopting AI is like 'surgery without the drugs'", "summary": "Cisco's chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, compared adopting artificial intelligence to \"surgery without the drugs,\" describing the process as painful for the networking giant. Centoni is transforming Cisco's 20,000-employee customer experience division into an AI-native organization, a shift that required redesigning workflows after initial attempts to bolt AI onto old processes only \"annoyed our customers faster.\" The company now routes nearly 88% of its 1.5 million annual support cases to the right engineer on the first try, measuring success by the number of calls requiring zero or one handoffs.", "body_md": "When a corporate leader has to [integrate AI](https://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-boards-divided-over-ai-implementation-speed-survey-2026-5) into their giant global company with tens of thousands of employees scattered across offices around the world, there's probably going to be some discomfort.\n\nCisco's chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, described the process as \"surgery without the drugs.\"\n\n\"It's painful,\" she told Business Insider.\n\nCisco makes networking, security, and collaboration technology for companies, including routers, switches, cybersecurity tools, and services that help connect and protect corporate IT systems. So its customer support team is essential.\n\nCentoni, who leads Cisco's roughly 20,000-employee [customer experience](https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-customer-service-profit-annoyance-economy-2026-3) division, said she is now transforming it into an AI-native services organization.\n\nShe said that adopting AI has required more than simply bolting it onto old workflows — something Cisco tried before realizing it only made flawed processes move faster.\n\nOne example was customer support.\n\nCisco first used [generative AI](https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-gen-ai-is-changing-the-way-we-work) to create case summaries when one support engineer handed a case to another, whether because of a shift change, availability, or the need for different expertise. The goal was to give engineers more context. However, Centoni said it only \"annoyed our customers faster,\" because it made handoffs more efficient but did not address the bigger issue.\n\n\"The outcome was never the handoff,\" she said. It was \"how do I get to the right engineer the first time around?\"\n\nThat realization pushed Cisco to redesign the workflow, using \"intelligent routing\" to send cases to the right expert from the start. Cisco's** **customer experience division gets about 1.5 million support cases a year, and now, nearly 88% are routed to the right engineer the first time, Centoni said.\n\nA spokesperson for Cisco said the company now measures customer service success by the number of calls that require only one — or even zero — handoffs.\n\nThe best places to integrate AI, Centoni said, are in [repeatable workflows](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-automating-boring-work-killing-creativity-2026-3) that can be performed autonomously with more than 90% accuracy.\n\nThe company recently launched Cisco IQ, a digital interface for support and professional services that Centoni said is \"designed as a single source of truth for customers to address recurring customer pain points.\" She said it helps detect preventable outages, redirects employees who spend too much time \"interpreting data\" rather than acting on insights, and reduces frustrating support calls.\n\nFor Centoni, the test for any AI project is not just whether it improves efficiency. She said each initiative has to show what work it will stop, and whether it can grow revenue, expand margins, deepen customer trust, or help teams build what comes next.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cisco-exec-says-adopting-ai-is-like-surgery-without-the-drugs", "canonical_source": "https://www.businessinsider.com/cisco-ai-adoption-customer-service-2026-5", "published_at": "2026-05-29 09:11:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-29 09:44:13.008301+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "generative-ai", "ai-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Cisco", "Liz Centoni", "Business Insider"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cisco-exec-says-adopting-ai-is-like-surgery-without-the-drugs", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cisco-exec-says-adopting-ai-is-like-surgery-without-the-drugs.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cisco-exec-says-adopting-ai-is-like-surgery-without-the-drugs.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cisco-exec-says-adopting-ai-is-like-surgery-without-the-drugs.jsonld"}}