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,” Cisco’s chief customer experience officer Liz Centoni, said at this week’s Cisco Live 2025 conference in San Diego. The event — which attracted 22,000 delegates — is one of the world’s biggest showcases of innovation in computer networking.
“Companies are focused on experiences,” she 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, and 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,” Centoni 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. 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?”
Centoni 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.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins echoed this in his opening keynote address on Tuesday. “Last year, we were talking about chatbots and efficiencies, now, we’re talking about managing the workforce — humans and agents.”
That shift reframes the whole enterprise stack, from infrastructure to interface. “You have to build it with integrity, and you have to build it with a consideration for humanity. That’s underpinned by trust,” said Robins.
Empathetic technology — 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
Centoni said the same ethos applied to internal operations. “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.”
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.
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 long-standing gaps in infrastructure, financial inclusion and access.
Empathetic technology — 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. “Silicon One plays an incredible role,” Robbins told Business Times.
“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 such as South Africa.”
• Arthur Goldstuck is author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AI.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.