Cisco Live: Business must
digitise empathy

Customer experience has been reinvented and redefined by technologies that go beyond speed and efficiency. However, in the rush to personalise and automate, one essential element has fallen out of focus.

“We haven’t digitised empathy,” said Liz Centoni, chief customer experience officer, at this week’s Cisco Live 2025 conference in San Diego. The event, which attracted 22,000 delegates, is one of the world’s major showcases of innovation in computer networking.

“Companies are focused on experiences,” Centoni told a media briefing on the eve of the conference on Monday. “But we’ve put all this focus on the technology, and we need to bring in the human side of it more deliberately.”

Centoni wants to reframe that human element of technology to go beyond chatbot pleasantries. She sees empathy as a design principle and, right now, it is missing in action.

This idea goes to the heart of how customer experience is being reinvented. CX, as it is known in the industry, is being transformed through slicker apps, smarter bots and, more fundamentally, by redefining the relationship between technology and trust.

“There’s a long way to go in building trust,” she said during a keynote address on Wednesday. “And it’s going to be built from the ground up, in how we design experiences, how we design AI, and how we ensure our customers know they’re in control.”

Control was a theme she returned to repeatedly, as a practical requirement for the AI age.

“We need to build experiences that respect people’s comfort and privacy. That starts with transparency and control.”

Centoni said that much of the innovation happening in customer engagement has been supply-driven rather than empathy-driven.

“We think of customer experience as what the company does to you, or for you. But what if we reframed that as what the customer chooses for themselves, and we simply help enable that?”

The question lands at a moment when the technologies that define customer interaction – from websites to call centres to digital assistants – are undergoing a structural transformation.

Cisco calls it the “experience internet.” It describes a serious infrastructure shift: rearchitecting network and application layers so that experience is delivered, actively monitored, shaped, and optimised in real time.

“The old model was best effort,” said Centoni. “Now we have to build for guaranteed outcomes. That changes the entire fabric: from observability to security to workload placement.”

This new fabric is made possible through AI-native telemetry, predictive analytics and application-aware routing. The point is simple: every click, pause, and drop in voice quality becomes part of a feedback loop. As a result, the experience becomes responsive.

Or, in Centoni’s words: “You visibility is essential for improvement.”

What does visibility mean in a network that spans clouds, data centres, interfaces and endpoints? Cisco’s answer is Full-Stack Observability (FSO), a suite of tools that tie application performance to business metrics.

Centoni said: “We used to think about observability as log files. Now it’s about user sentiment. Is the application making your life better, or is it just faster?”

She described a future in which technical metrics are reframed through human outcomes.

“Latency, packet loss, CPU load – all of that matters, but only if it connects to something the customer experiences. Otherwise, we’re just tuning an engine and ignoring the driver.”

The broader goal, she argued, was to move from reactivity to proactivity. Or from fixing what’s broken to anticipating what’s needed.

Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO, echoed this in his opening keynote address on Tuesday. “Last year we were talking about chatbots and efficiencies,” he said. “Now we’re talking about managing the workforce: humans and agents.”

That shift reframes the whole enterprise stack, from infrastructure to interface. At its centre sits a question of trust.

 “You have to build it with integrity, and you have to build it with a consideration for humanity,” said Robbins. “That’s underpinned by trust.”

Centoni, in turn, made it clear that trust also includes consent: “Just because you can use data doesn’t mean you’ve earned the right to use it. Earning that right means explaining why, how, and what’s in it for the customer.”

The same ethos applied to internal operations, she said. “Transparency and explainability matter just as much internally. Employees need to understand how decisions are made, especially when AI is involved. That’s how you build cultures of accountability.”

“We’ve been building systems that assume the user adapts to the tech. That’s backwards. The systems need to adapt to us.”

This approach is already finding its way into Cisco’s product strategy. Centoni pointed to new integrations between the experience assurance platform ThousandEyes and big data platform Splunk that enable predictive service quality. If a degradation is detected, agents can not only flag the issue, but also simulate its business impact before it happens.

At the same time, it blurs the boundary between IT operations and customer experience. Cisco’s bet is that these two worlds are no longer separable.

Oliver Tuszik, Cisco’s chief sales officer,  told a media briefing: “In the past, customer experience was what happened after the sale. Today, it starts before the first interaction and continues after the product is retired.”

Tuszik said it was a lifecycle approach, which required continuous visibility, engagement, and adjustment.

“And it’s not just about satisfaction,” he said. “It’s about value realisation. Are customers achieving what they set out to do with your product or service? That’s the new north star.”

Centoni took it a step further: “The most powerful feedback comes more reliably from behaviour than from surveys. It comes from what people do. Observing their intent gives us the truest signal.”

As these ideas reshape global enterprise thinking, they take on added weight in emerging markets. In these regions, empathy in customer experience forms the foundation for inclusion, trust-building, and participation in the digital economy. When businesses design systems that truly understand and respect users, they unlock opportunities that go beyond commerce.

That’s especially true in Africa, where digital services must compensate for longstanding gaps in infrastructure, financial inclusion, and access. Empathetic technology, meaning systems that adapt to the user, that speak their language, anticipate their needs, and respect their context, can be the difference between adoption and exclusion.

Cisco’s programmable silicon architecture for networking and AI workloads, Silicon One, fits neatly into this category through lowering costs and addressing infrastructure gaps

Robbins told Gadget: “Silicon One plays an incredible role. It’s being rolled into nearly every platform we build, including those running in hyperscale environments. The programmability makes it much easier and faster for us to support new use cases, which will be critical for building sovereign AI infrastructure in markets like South Africa.”

* Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI”.