Cisco and Mistral AI

For Cisco, a leader in software, network and security solutions, drafting quality renewal proposals has a direct impact on not only revenue but also retention and market positioning. This case study explains how Cisco collaborates with Mistral AI to create an AI agent to support their Customer Experience (CX) organization.

By leveraging Mistral AI's LLMs, Cisco's Customer Experience (CX) team is poised to achieve:

1. 20% time reduction on proposal generation
2. Increased productivity across an organization of 25,000+ 
3. Improved customer satisfaction

Background

In order to craft a renewal proposal, members of Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) team have to analyze more than 50 signals. Account managers faced the challenge of manually collecting and interpreting both structured and unstructured data representing many different customer interactions across product lines. This process left little time to create personalized, data-driven proposals with tailored value propositions and key benefits for each account.

“Mistral AI is a critical partner for Cisco Customer Experience (CX) as we build towards an Agentic-AI-Led future. The AI Renewals Agent is just the start of what we can build together with Mistral’s LLMs.”

Liz Centoni, Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Cisco

Using AI to transform the renewal experience

The AI Renewals Agent was the first jointly developed AI solution to come out of Cisco and Mistral AI’s strategic partnership and immediately began to improve and streamline the renewal proposal creation process.

Cisco’s use case involved a lot of TXT to SQL across multiple platforms with customer data that needs to stay on premise. The CX team also has a lot of Cisco specific data and knowledge that models are not natively trained on.

Mistral’s Applied AI and Cisco's CX teams are collaborating on various fine tuning techniques to solve this use case while managing to scale the deployment across Cisco’s GPU cluster. This will continue to improve the performance of the AI Renewals Agent and allow it to be utilized by more teams.

Results

Initial data suggests the AI Renewals Agent could reduce time spent creating renewal proposals and preparing for customer engagements by as much as 20%. This figure is poised to grow as the AI agent improves based on usage and more workflows are automated.

Conclusion

AI tools like Cisco’s AI Renewal Agent have the potential to change the proposal process, increasing productivity and driving a deeper, more nuanced understanding of customer needs. By combining industry expertise with AI, Cisco can better highlight the value of their technology during a pivotal moment in the customer relationship.