At WebexOne 2025, Cisco unveiled its AI-powered Webex Contact Center solution that includes quality management and AI for the evolving human and digital workforce; industry integrations with Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, and Epic; and a new vision for “connected intelligence”.
Omdia view
Summary
At WebexOne 2025, Cisco unveiled its AI-powered Webex Contact Center solution that includes quality management and AI for the evolving human and digital workforce; industry integrations with Salesforce, Amazon Web Services, and Epic; and a new vision for “connected intelligence”.
Cisco adds natively integrated QM to its technology stack
Recognizing the shift toward mixed human and digital workforces, Cisco unveiled its vision to create “connected intelligence” for enterprises at WebexOne 2025 in San Diego this week. This goal, according to Cisco executives, leverages a connected and open technology ecosystem that will redefine customer experiences across three interaction pillars, where people and people, people and AI, and AI and AI work together.
As enterprises evolve to include all three pillars in their customer support efforts, Cisco has recognized the need to monitor all aspects of the customer journey, including all interactions with human and AI agents. Doing this enables supervisors to better manage coaching and improvement efforts for human and digital agents. To help, Cisco unveiled its Webex AI Quality Management (QM) offering, which enables supervisors to view, assess, and coach their entire human and digital workforce through a single, unified platform.
In the Agent Performance dashboard, supervisors gain AI-assisted scoring of real-time customer engagement metrics such as handled interactions, average handle time, average hold time, customer satisfaction, talk ratio, average sentiment score, and average evaluation score. Immediately below the agent scores, supervisors can see how they have been trending over a set period, such as the past seven days. Supervisors can also see whether individual scores are above or below team averages. Additionally, the dashboard shares weekly insights for individual agents, such as “What’s going well” and “Performance tips” (e.g., it might state an agent should strengthen dental insurance knowledge or pause, listen, and respond empathetically). In addition to these personalized coaching tips for human agents, Webex AI QM offers actionable recommendations and performance optimization for AI agents.
Why does this matter? Currently, similar workforce engagement management (WEM) benefits are only available to Cisco clients through its partner Calabrio, owned by Thoma Bravo. However, starting in 1Q26, Webex AI QM will be available natively in Webex Contact Center, which gives Cisco an opportunity to differentiate by offering integrated QM solutions within its contact center stack, rather than relying on bolt-on partner integrations. Additionally, the timing of this integration could help set some Calabrio customers at ease, as Thoma Bravo has already announced plans to acquire Verint and integrate the Verint and Calabrio WEM platforms, which naturally presents some uncertainties for existing Verint and Calabrio customers.
Agentic AI availability
Cisco also unveiled plans to offer autonomous and guided self-service in its Webex AI Agent for Contact Center that will provide faster and more personalized service to customers. In 1Q26, Cisco aims to provide support for multi-agent collaboration using standard protocols, such as agent-to-agent (A2A) and model context protocol (MCP). These protocols enable Webex AI Agents to autonomously interact with third-party agents and connect to various applications and data sources.
As for agent assistance capabilities, Cisco AI Assistant in Contact Center, which became generally available in early 2025, has more features coming this year, including suggested responses, real-time transcription, and mid-call and wrap-up summaries. These upcoming features aim to boost efficiency, performance, and customer satisfaction during and after customer calls.
Industry integrations
Cisco has also been strengthening its partner network, starting with Salesforce. The two vendors are joining forces to enable deeper integration of Webex and Salesforce CRM data. Once completed, each interaction can be managed directly inside Salesforce through Service Cloud Voice. The integrated offering will be generally available in 1Q26.
Another noteworthy partnership involves AWS. Webex Contact Center and Contact Center Enterprise customers using AWS can leverage Amazon Lex to build conversational AI interfaces that let users interact naturally by voice or chat. Integration with Amazon Lex is available now, so customers have the flexibility to build Amazon Lex virtual agents with AI receptionist capabilities to deflect or route inbound calls, improve caller intent recognition, and accelerate resolution of live interactions with an agent.
Finally, Cisco unveiled that the Webex Contact Center can be integrated with Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) software to provide more tailored and compassionate support.
Subtle, but important, takeaway
Unlike previous years, at the WebexOne 2025 event, Cisco executives didn’t focus too much on separate CCaaS, UCaaS, or CPaaS messaging. Instead, presenters focused on the broader aforementioned “connected intelligence” message. This is a subtle, but important shift in the way Cisco executives are promoting the company, as the connected intelligence model can leverage platforms, data, and applications from each technology area.
Taking this broader view of technology is not unlike CCaaS vendors’ attempts to broaden their focus on the CX market. Unfortunately, many publicly traded CCaaS- and business process outsourcers-turned-CX companies are getting hammered by Wall Street analysts, who fear their revenue will be cannibalized by AI and automation. Cisco, however, is in a more favorable position because it has multiple revenue streams coming from various business segments, including networking, collaboration, and subscription services. Additionally, its ability to focus on and unify CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS technologies gives the company a scope that is even broader than CX, because Cisco’s efforts go beyond customer experiences to include employee experiences, as well. Cisco’s emphasis on connected intelligence works well for the company because it represents a holistic approach that ties AI and automation into the fabric of its multi-segment business model. This is a well-played, strategic move by Cisco.
Appendix
Further reading
“WFM Gets Agentic at Verint Engage 2025” (September 2025)
“Thoma Bravo merges Verint and Calabrio to forge an AI-driven CX powerhouse Omdia” (September 2025)
“NiCE’s acquisition of Cognigy: A new era for AI-powered CX automation” (August 2025)
CCaaS Annual Tracker and Forecast – CY24 (July 2025)
2025 Trends to Watch: Contact Centers (December 2024)
Workforce Engagement Management Forecast – 2023–28 Data (June 2024)
Workforce Engagement Management Forecast – 2023–28 Analysis (June 2024)
Author
David Myron, Principal Analyst, Customer Engagement, Omdia
