By Lakshmi Varanasi
Publication Date: 2026-05-29 09:11:00
When a corporate leader has to integrate AI 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.
Cisco’s chief customer experience officer, Liz Centoni, described the process as “surgery without the drugs.”
“It’s painful,” she told Business Insider.
Cisco 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.
Centoni, who leads Cisco’s roughly 20,000-employee customer experience division, said she is now transforming it into an AI-native services organization.
She 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.
One example was customer support.
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