Cisco gave every employee an AI agent. Is this the future of work?
What comes after workplace chatbots? Cisco's MyAgent offers a glimpse, with AI agents handling tasks under human supervision.
AI is getting a desk at Cisco. The firm has rolled out a personal AI agent called MyAgent to its 90,000 employees worldwide, giving every worker access to an AI assistant that can help with everyday tasks.
This shows how enterprise AI is shifting from small experiments to tools that could become part of the normal workday.
What MyAgent can actually do
MyAgent is designed to do more than answer questions. It can work with tools such as Outlook, Webex, Jira and SharePoint to help employees move tasks forward. An employee can give it a goal, and the agent can use approved information and applications to help coordinate the work.
That is the difference between an AI chatbot and an AI agent. A chatbot generally responds to a prompt. An agent can take a goal and work through several steps to help achieve it.
Cisco connects MyAgent to approved AI models, enterprise data and workplace applications through Circuit, its secure AI platform. The company describes this approach as supervised autonomous execution, meaning the AI can handle parts of a workflow while people remain in control.
Why Cisco is making the move
Giving an AI agent to 90,000 employees is a much bigger experiment than putting a chatbot in front of a few teams. It suggests Cisco sees AI as part of its everyday workplace infrastructure rather than just another productivity tool.
Instead of spending time searching through documents, chasing updates, moving information between applications or handling repetitive coordination, employees could ask an agent to help do some of the legwork.
For example, an agent could potentially pull together information from different workplace tools and help prepare the next step, while the employee reviews and approves the result.
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The human still has to stay in the loop
There is an obvious catch. The more access an AI agent gets, the more important trust becomes. Employees need to know what information the system can see, which actions it can take and what happens when it gets something wrong.
AI agents can misunderstand instructions, miss important context or produce incorrect results. That becomes more serious when the system is connected to multiple business applications. Clear permissions, monitoring and human review therefore become just as important as the AI itself.
Is this where work is heading?
Cisco’s rollout does not mean every company is about to hand an AI agent to every employee. Cost, security and integration can make large-scale deployment difficult. But the direction is hard to miss.
AI is moving from something employees occasionally ask for help with to something that could quietly work alongside them throughout the day. The interesting question is how much of the workday companies will eventually be comfortable handing over to AI.