Cisco's Contact Center Bet: Where the 2026 Roadmap Money Is Actually Going
- Tim Banting
- Aug 13
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 1
SoWhatNowWhat — Pattern
Verdict
Cisco is putting its collaboration money straight into contact centres and AI agents for 2026. To be frank, it's the only part of that unit showing real, steady growth.
Confidence: Medium — If Cisco ever starts showing contact centre earnings on their own separate line, we can move that up to high. But if next year's financial results go back to treating Webex or hardware devices as the main story, it drops to low.
Decision Relevance: Strategic bet — This shows rival contact centre vendors where Cisco plans to throw its weight over the next year to 18 months, and what that fight will actually look like.
What's Moving
At Cisco Live Americas 2026, about twenty of the sixty new collaboration tools Cisco announced were focused on contact centres and customer service. That is a bigger slice than what they gave to standard Webex or hardware devices. The big releases included new AI tools for managing staff, an automated AI concierge, and a monitoring tool called AI Agent 360.
Cisco isn't just selling its contact centre platform as a standalone product anymore. Instead, they are plugging it straight into software companies they don't even own. They built native tools for ServiceNow and Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, and added a connector for Amazon Lex to handle virtual agents.
Cisco’s own 2026 numbers show a bumpy road for its collaboration business. They brought in $1,055 million in Q1, up to $1,054 million in Q2, down to $1,024 million in Q3, and then up to $1,167 million in Q4. That is hardly a smooth climb. The only real bright spot management kept bringing up on earnings calls was the contact centre business, which saw its recurring revenue grow by 4% in Q3 and stayed positive through to the end of the year.
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