Cisco’s launch of the Cisco 360 Partner Program is not just an operational tweak. It is a signal that large vendors believe the next wave of enterprise AI, including agentic AI, will be won by organizations that can combine infrastructure, governance, and partner-delivered outcomes, not by teams running isolated pilots.
Cisco says the program was co-designed with partners over fifteen months. It is built to help partners deliver outcomes across AI-ready data centers, future-proofed workplaces, and digital resilience. It also introduces new partner designations, a Partner Locator, and a revamped incentives-and-measurement approach that rewards value creation across the customer lifecycle.
For CX leaders trying to implement AI responsibly, that lifecycle focus matters because customer experience gains rarely come from a single deployment. They come from sustained adoption, integration, and operational change. According to Elisabeth De Dobbeleer, Senior Vice President, Cisco Partner Program
“The Cisco 360 Partner Program was designed with partners to foster collective success, enable differentiation, and help partners scale with confidence. It’s about making our ecosystem’s unique value clear to the market and our customers.”
What partners are saying:
“Insight is fully aligned with the Cisco Partner 360 Program and its focus on delivering meaningful customer outcomes. This approach reflects how we engage every day – leaning in to solve complex business challenges and accelerate transformation. Together, we are positioned to create even greater impact and measurable value for our shared customers.”
Kevin Brown, Vice President, Partner Management, Insight
“We’ve already actively engaged in the Cisco 360 Partner Program leading up to the launch and are already seeing the benefits of the Cisco Partner Incentive Estimator for planning. This insight plays a critical role in ensuring we deliver the most competitive solutions to our customers.”
Lane Irvine, Director, Strategic Alliances, Long View Systems
What the Cisco 360 Program Indicates, and What It Confirms About AI in CX
It confirms readiness is becoming the buying decision, not the demo
Cisco’s announcement explicitly points to its AI Readiness Index, and the data explains why.
In the recent index, Cisco reports that only 13 percent to 14 percent of organizations consistently qualify as Pacesetters, the group outperforming peers on AI value measures. That is a small club, and it reinforces a practical reality for CX leaders: most enterprises are still building the foundations required for AI to deliver repeatable customer outcomes.
Cisco also reports that only 32 percent of organizations have a process to measure the impact of AI initiatives. Pacesetters, by comparison, sit at 95 percent. That gap suggests many AI for CX programs are still struggling to prove what they improved, what it cost, and whether it scaled.
Cisco found that only one in three organizations have a process to measure AI impact, compared with 95 percent of Pacesetters.
It suggests partner ecosystems are shifting toward outcome accountability
Cisco is not only changing incentives. It is changing how customers find capability, using partner designations and a locator across portfolios including Security, Networking, Collaboration, Services, Splunk, and Cloud and AI Infrastructure.
For CX leaders, this points to a market in which vendors expect customers to assemble partner teams that blend data, security, integration, and change management. AI in CX crosses too many organizational boundaries to be owned by a single function.
Cisco’s program also introduces measurement frameworks, including Partner Value Indexes, that Cisco says will expand with tailored indexes for different partner types. That emphasis on measurement mirrors what the AI Readiness Index says is missing inside many enterprises: discipline, metrics, and operational repeatability.
It aligns with the coming pressure of AI agents on CX infrastructure and risk
Cisco’s AI Readiness Index reports that 83 percent of companies plan to develop or deploy AI agents.
At the same time, only 34 percent of organizations surveyed feel their IT infrastructure is fully adaptable and scalable for evolving AI compute needs.
For CX leaders, that mismatch is not abstract. Agentic AI in service, journey orchestration, and real time personalization pushes heavier demands onto identity, data access, monitoring, and security controls.
Cisco’s index also states only 31 percent of organizations feel fully equipped to control and secure agentic AI systems.
When Cisco positions Cisco 360 around AI ready infrastructure and digital resilience, it confirms that AI in CX is moving into a phase where security and infrastructure bottlenecks can directly limit customer facing outcomes.
Why this matters for CX leaders implementing AI
Watching how CX initiatives play out in practice highlights a recurring issue. Many CX teams are being asked to deploy AI while still negotiating basic questions like data ownership, model risk, and who is accountable when automation touches a customer.
Cisco’s data suggests that the winners are treating readiness as a system, not a project. Cisco reports that Pacesetters are far more likely to have finalized their AI use cases (77 percent vs 18 percent overall) and far more likely to measure impact (95 percent vs 32 percent). That pattern matters for CX because the highest value AI work often requires cross functional alignment, shared metrics, and sustained adoption, not a one off tool rollout.
Cisco also reports that AI’s impact on customer experience is meeting or exceeding expectations for 67 percent of all companies, rising to 90 percent for Pacesetters. That gap is a practical roadmap for CX leaders. Better outcomes appear correlated with readiness, not simply higher enthusiasm.
Practical takeaways: how CX leaders can respond to this signal
Cisco 360 is a partner program announcement, but it points to a CX execution playbook that is becoming more common across enterprise tech.
First, CX leaders should treat partner selection as part of AI governance. If agents and automation are on the roadmap, we need implementation partners that can prove security, monitoring, and identity integration skills, not only prompt engineering and UI configuration.
Second, CX leaders should demand measurement early. Cisco’s index highlights that only 32 percent of organizations have a process to measure AI impact. If we cannot quantify containment, AHT impact, deflection quality, CSAT movement, and risk outcomes, AI investments will stall.
Third, we should plan for AI infrastructure debt. Cisco introduces this as the accumulation of compromises and underinvestment across compute, networking, data management, security, and talent. In CX terms, this is what shows up as brittle integrations, inconsistent answers, slow response times, and compliance anxiety that blocks scale.
The real test is not understanding this, it is acting on it
Cisco’s 360 Partner Program is a strong indicator that the AI era is becoming more operational, more measured, and more ecosystem driven. For CX leaders, it confirms that the future of AI in customer experience will be shaped by readiness: clean data, scalable infrastructure, strong security, and change management that brings teams along.
In a world where AI agents are moving from experiments to autonomous actions, CX leaders will redefine what it means to deliver trust, speed, and personalization at scale. The teams that build the foundations now will be the ones setting customer expectations next. Are we ready to run CX like an AI powered operating model?
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