Global technology major Cisco is witnessing rising demand from Indian enterprises to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in customer experience, even as most of them are still early in their adoption journey.
Liz Centoni, executive vice-president and chief customer experience officer, Cisco, told FE that while interest has moved beyond pilots, infrastructure and readiness gaps persist. “In fact, that presents a big challenge…only 21% of Indian companies have the adequate GPUs (graphic processing units) and data centre capabilities to meet the demands of these AI workloads. This is because the networks of yesterday are not what you need to meet these AI workloads,” Centoni said.
She added that modernising networks for scale, performance and security is now paramount to any transformation process.
With the rollout of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, Indian clients are also demanding stronger compliance and localisation. The main asks are related to data centres to ensure sovereignty and localisation, she said, adding that Cisco is working towards these asks through initiatives like the recent additions for its Webex and security services.
Centoni said that while 93% of enterprises expect companies like Cisco to use AI for more personalised, proactive services, only 2% feel fully ready to maximise its impact. To close this gap, Cisco has developed an AI Adoption Framework that helps clients prioritise use cases, choose deployment models and establish governance.
Centoni said Cisco is using its own AI experience to guide customers, focusing on training teams, demonstrating return on investment (RoI) through time savings and embedding AI into existing workflows. The aim, she noted, is to simplify adoption, show immediate value, and avoid disruptive large-scale workflow replacements. “We walk customers through the governance aspect and the open and flexible approach that Cisco’s taken on AI,” she added.
Cisco, which handles about 1.5 million support cases a year, has long used AI and machine learning in automation and self-service. But Centoni said the customer expectations in the era of GenAI and Agentic AI are changing pretty significantly. The company’s goal, she added, is “to make every customer feel like their only customer because we’ve known them so extremely well”.
India’s digital transformation has also blurred lines between traditional and digital-native businesses. “I was pleasantly surprised that we’re talking about what one would call traditional banking segment already way down the path around not just experimentation, but leveraging multiple large language models,” she said.
Centoni acknowledged that the technology is advancing faster than ever in her 25 years at Cisco. “It’s a space where I would say the technology is changing at a pace that I haven’t seen,” she said — a pace that Indian enterprises will need to match through investment, skills and governance.