The Future of Support: Agentic AI to Handle 68% of CX by 2028
The research highlights the urgent need for technology vendors, many of whom are still only exploring the potential for agentic AI deployment within CX, to accelerate their strategies.
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The future of CX is rapidly evolving as AI becomes smarter and more autonomous. Agentic AI, a next-generation technology, is set to transform how businesses interact with customers by enabling AI systems to independently manage complex tasks with minimal human oversight.
Cisco’s latest global research report, The Race to an Agentic Future: How Agentic AI Will Transform Customer Experience, highlights this potential to revolutionise how technology vendors deliver services and support.
Surveying 7,950 business and technical decision-makers across 30 countries, the report reveals strong confidence in agentic AI’s role, with respondents expecting it to play an increasingly significant part in their interactions with technology vendors.
An impressive 88% believe agentic AI-led CX will help their organisations achieve critical goals—such as enhancing IT efficiency, resilience, and security, accelerating key strategic projects, and maximising returns on IT investments.
Moreover, respondents anticipate the shift to agentic AI-driven CX—including technical support, customer success, and professional services—to accelerate much faster than previously expected. They predict that within three years, 68% of CX interactions with technology vendors will be managed by agentic AI.
Even more striking, 56% expect over half of these interactions to be handled by agentic AI within the next 12 months—putting pressure on vendors who have yet to fully embrace this technology.
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Liz Centoni, EVP & Chief Customer Experience Officer, Cisco, commented, “With agentic AI reaching a new level of maturity, we’re closer than ever to solving some of the most persistent customer pain points in enterprise environments.”
“For instance, a significant share of network issues stems from misconfiguration, something agentic systems are poised to eliminate. That shift will lead to smarter networks, stronger security, and more productive teams.”
“As an industry, we’ve been talking about these concepts for decades, and while we’ve made incremental progress, AI – and especially agentic AI – is making that vision a reality.”
In recent years, in response to growing IT complexity, technology businesses have introduced automation into their workflows and layered in AI to streamline support and services. This approach has still required human intervention to stitch processes together – to monitor, decide, act and adapt. Agentic AI negates the need for this level of human intervention.
Agentic AI requires agency, meaning the AI Agents are capable of having memory, are task aware and possess the ability to independently take actions – or choose what actions to take or recommend – to achieve a particular outcome through the ability to learn from their environment and reason, with minimal human oversight.
This frees up CX professionals to focus on complex problem-solving, humans-on-the-loop feedback process for specific use-cases (where humans, for example, provide feedback to an AI system to improve its performance and focus on accurate and safe results), and building deeper, trusted relationships with customers.
The research highlights the urgent need for technology vendors, many of whom are still only exploring the potential for agentic AI deployment within CX, to accelerate their strategies.
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Respondents are clear that they believe vendors who are left behind or fail to deploy agentic AI in an effective, secure and ethical manner, will suffer a deterioration in customer relationships, reputational damage and higher levels of customer churn.
Meanwhile, the research highlights that respondents feel that vendors who embrace this transformation head-on, seamlessly and ethically deploying agentic AI across the technology lifecycle, will benefit from data-driven insights, improved scalability within their support and services, and loyalty at scale.
CX will become a strategic differentiator, with 81% of respondents predicting that vendors that successfully deliver agentic AI-led CX will gain a competitive edge.
Key Findings
- As levels of IT complexity increase, organisations are leaning on technology vendors more than ever. 92% of respondents state that the support and services provided by vendors are becoming more critical in the AI era.
- More than 80% of respondents point to potential benefits of agentic AI-led CX at every stage of the technology lifecycle, with customer and technical support, technology strategy and planning, and operations viewed as the greatest opportunities.
- Customers expect agentic AI to drive improvements in IT productivity, time savings, and cost savings, as well as opportunities to improve data analytics, troubleshooting, and alignment of technology investment with digital transformation goals.
- Customers want to retain human interaction when engaging with support and services, with 96% stating that human relationships are very important when interacting with B2B technology partners.
- 99% of respondents state that it’s important for technology partners to demonstrate robust governance arrangements to deliver ethical use of agentic AI, and 81% feel that vendors need to share their vision for AI-led CX to bring customers along on the journey.
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