58. The AI Advantage With Liz Centoni: How Cisco is Making Customer Experience Hyper-Personal

Guest Profile

Liz Centoni brings over 25 years of experience at Cisco where she currently leads a team of 20,000+ people dedicated to helping customers maximize the value of their technology investments. She also serves on the boards of Mercedes-Benz and Workday.

Episode Highlights

Cisco's Unique Position in the AI Landscape

• Liz outlines Cisco's three-pillar approach to AI:
  1. Investment in back-end AI networks with hyperscalers
  2. Enterprise deployment of secure AI use cases
  3. Meeting increased capacity requirements for both private and public front-end cloud networks
• Recent partnership with NVIDIA to accelerate AI adoption and simplify building AI-ready data centers

Transforming Customer Experience

• Vision for customer experience: personalized, proactive, and predictive
• Goal: Make every customer "feel like they are our only customer"
• Leveraging data across tech stacks to break down silos and deliver proactive experiences
• Using AI to reduce cognitive load and workplace friction for employees

AI Renewals Agent: A Case Study in Predictive AI

• Jointly developed with Mistral AI and announced in February 2025
• Consolidates data from 50+ signals and sources (both structured and unstructured)
• Provides real-time sentiment analysis by incorporating customer support data
• Expected to reduce time spent on renewal proposals from 40% to less than 5%

The Future of Agentic AI

• Moving from AI as a tool to AI as a teammate
• Current focus on assisting and augmenting tasks, not replacing roles
• Human oversight remains critical for complex customer networks
• Evolution from reactive to proactive customer care

Impact on Jobs and Work

• Expectation that everyone needs baseline AI skills
• Historical pattern of rebalancing versus complete replacement
• Focus on using AI to eliminate busy work and reduce cognitive load
• Importance of emotional intelligence and empathy in areas where AI still falls short

Closing Thoughts

Liz's definition of success: "Customers walk up and say, 'You really know me better than I know myself'... and they feel they can't live without three things: Cisco's security, Cisco's networking portfolio, and Cisco services."