Author name: Christian Joseph

I’ve been listening to the presentations at Cisco Live this week. The headline this week is that Cisco aims to become “the infrastructure layer for the agentic enterprise.” Cisco has been building this quietly, with some incredible partnerships. The centerpiece is Cisco Cloud Control. This is a unified platform built for humans and AI agents to manage, monitor, and defend critical IT infrastructure and is the foundation for Cisco’s AgenticOps operating model.

I highlighted in a few blogs recently on the importance of a solid infrastructure for Voice AI and CX workloads. Agentic workloads are real-time. Voice AI deployments are latency-sensitive. Managing that will be a challenge without the investment in a strong infrastructure. Imagine managing speech-to-speech translations or autonomous AI agents resolving issues at scale. All of this depends on the underlying network, compute, and observability behaving predictably.

For a CX or collaboration buyer, Cisco’s investments at the “infrastructure layer” signal to its customers and prospects that the reliability, reduced latency, security, and data governance it provides is an important consideration for Voice AI deployments. Cisco’s bet is that as multiple agents become embedded co-workers handling live customer interactions, the vendor that controls the network, compute, security, and observability as one fabric can deliver solid and reliable agentic experiences.

It was also good to hear about Cisco’s announcement on Webex Workforce Management. The workforce of the future will span AI Agents, Humans in the loop, Voice AI agents. The algorithms to manage these new dynamics will be important.

I had the opportunity to attend the Salesforce Agentforce World Tour Summit in Singapore last week. Salesforce announced a record annual revenue of $41.5 billion for fiscal year 2026, marking a 10% year-over-year increase. The company projects continued strong growth, fueled by its Agentforce AI platform, with long-term goals of surpassing $63 billion in organic revenue by FY30—a remarkable milestone.

A few things that stood out for me at the event:

• Salesforce is reaffirming its commitment to Singapore following its US$1 billion investment in Singapore last year. They will launch the AI Innovation Hub in June this year, which is expected to provide businesses and partners in Singapore with most of the tools they need for their agentic enterprise AI journey.

• Hearing from various customers on stage was insightful, but Grab’s story stood out in particular. Grab, a platform nearly ubiquitous across Asia where Uber does not operate, relies heavily on Salesforce. For Grab, data is a critical asset that enables them to scale their business across the region. They feed this data into AI systems to optimize platform efficiency—from matching riders and drivers faster to improving delivery routes, guiding drivers during heavy traffic, and dynamically adjusting prices based on demand.

• Gavin Barfield, Salesforce CTO for ASEAN, outlined the Salesforce Agentic Enterprise Architecture. This approach is powerful because it integrates human and AI agents with CRM workflows, flow automation, case management, service operations, approvals, and escalations.

As an analyst in the Contact Centre and CX space, I see Salesforce disrupting the market through its strength in data and workflow orchestration. The company is advancing toward multi-agent orchestration, which is highly significant for contact centers. In this new paradigm, service agents, operations agents, back-office agents, marketing agents, sales agents, and others will seamlessly share context, collaborate, monitor, and coordinate workflows across the contact center.

Historically, Salesforce has operated on the periphery of the CX space with Service Cloud. Now, it is firmly in the contact center arena—a vendor to watch given its scale and reach. They are also well entrenched with the large global SI’s and have a good partner footprint across the APAC region.

The contact center market is becoming increasingly competitive, with buyers able to choose from Traditional CCaaS vendors, Hyperscalers, AI-native CX vendors, and CRM/ITSM vendors.

Thanks, Tim Shepheard and the Salesforce team, for having me at the Agentforce summit.