Cisco to roll out AI agents to all 90,000 employees from August

Cisco will begin rolling out AI agents to all 90,000 employees from August, in what is said to be one of the largest corporate deployments of AI assistants so far. According to a Fortune report, every employee will receive a personalised agent that can handle tasks, answer questions and route requests to the most efficient AI model. Chief Financial Officer Mark Patterson said the system is designed to balance performance and cost.

Adoption at scale brings challenges

As Cisco expands the use of AI across the company, it has also acknowledged the difficulties of adoption at scale. While Patterson has highlighted the business opportunity and the company’s growing use of AI in finance and operations, Cisco executive Liz Centoni said the shift inside a large enterprise can be “surgery without the drugs” and added, “It’s painful.”

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According to the report, Cisco’s system dynamically chooses the right model for each task. “We feel like that’s the most efficient way — to build our own AI stacks, which will go out and query the different models based on the particular use case,” Patterson said.

The AI agents are also being built to reduce token usage, a major cost factor in complex AI workloads. While standard chats may use a few thousand tokens, agent-based tasks can require hundreds of thousands or even millions. By keeping much of the infrastructure on-premises, Cisco is seeking greater control over costs as well as data security.

Cisco plans to pair the rollout with organisation-wide upskilling programmes and knowledge-sharing initiatives aimed at encouraging experimentation. Patterson said he expects internal competition as teams identify new uses for AI, which he believes could help drive innovation across departments.

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Centoni also revealed that Cisco’s experience showed that adding AI to existing workflows did not automatically fix deeper issues. Speaking to Business Insider, the chief customer experience officer said the company had faced challenges in turning its roughly 20,000-employee customer experience division into what she called an AI-native services organisation.

Taken together, Cisco’s latest AI push reflects both the scale of its ambitions and the practical challenges of applying the technology across a large organisation, from company-wide employee agents and finance tools to customer support and service operations.