AI agents on the rise in B2B customer service

In view of the increasing complexity of IT in the age of AI, technology providers are becoming increasingly important for Swiss companies. In fact, 88% of respondents in Switzerland say that the importance of these providers will continue to grow thanks to their support and services. Agent-based AI will play a growing role in this B2B customer interaction in the coming years. 82% of respondents in Switzerland believe that the use of AI agents in customer service will help their company to achieve its goals. For example, IT environments and IT operations can be made more efficient and secure and strategic IT projects can be accelerated. "Agent-based AI will become increasingly efficient at solving IT problems in corporate environments," says Liz Centoni, EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Cisco. "Many network problems are caused by misconfigurations, for example, which agent-based systems can resolve more quickly. This leads to smarter networks, better cyber security and more productive teams."

People remain important

In recent years, technology companies have already automated workflows and introduced AI to optimize support and services for their B2B customers. Agent-based AI can take over many tasks such as coordinating processes, making decisions or making adjustments by establishing a contextual connection between agents. AI agents have a memory, adapt to tasks and can take or recommend measures independently.

Although this reduces further manual processes, human control remains indispensable. For example, humans need to provide feedback to an AI system to improve its performance and achieve accurate and reliable results. With the support of AI, customer service teams can focus even more on solving complex problems. Finally, customers want to retain human interaction when using support and services. 93% of respondents in Switzerland say that human relationships are very important when interacting with B2B technology partners.

Further results for Switzerland

For 82% of respondents from Switzerland, AI agents enable personalized, proactive and predictive services. Those who successfully introduce them will gain a competitive advantage, according to 82 percent of participants. The Swiss respondents recognize the advantages in better IT productivity, time and cost savings as well as improved support and services. Furthermore, 75 percent of respondents see benefits of an AI-supported B2B customer experience at every stage of the technology lifecycle. They recognize the greatest opportunities in the areas of data analysis for decision making, troubleshooting and problem solving, and implementation. And finally, 99% of respondents feel that robust governance regulations are an essential foundation for the ethical use of agent-based AI. 65 percent believe that providers have a duty to disclose their own vision for an AI-supported customer experience.

"Building on four decades of experience, our deep industry knowledge and the trust of our customers, we want to redefine the Cisco Customer Experience as an agent-driven function," adds Liz Centoni. "Our vision is to make every customer interaction with Cisco personalized, proactive and predictive to make everyone feel like they are our most important customer. But even though we are making great progress, this new study shows one thing very clearly: we need to get even faster."

Source: Cisco