Building Frontier CX Agents | Interrupt 26

In this keynote from Interrupt 2026, Cisco Customer Experience Fellow and Chief Architect Carlos Pereira pulls back the curtain on how one of the world's largest enterprise organizations is building and scaling frontier AI agents for its Customer Experience (CX) division.

Carlos walks through Cisco's real-world journey from early chatbots and the "Agentic Foundation" to a fully AI-native "Renews Teammate" running in production across a $26B+ recurring revenue business. He shares candid lessons learned: why 95% accuracy wasn't enough for adoption, how bolting AI onto broken workflows can actually accelerate failure, and why the key to scaling agentic systems is keeping supervisors lean, introducing domain-specific planners, and building in self-correction by default.

You'll come away with a practical architecture playbook—covering supervisor graphs, nested subgraph planners, deterministic task workflows, routing-first design, and long-term memory—plus an honest look at the organizational challenges of getting people to actually use these systems.

Building Frontier CX Agents | Interrupt 26
00:00 Introduction & Cisco CX Overview
01:22 The Land, Adopt, Expand & Renew Model
02:36 From ChatGPT Hype to B2B Agentic AI
03:16 Why 2026 Is the Year of AI-Native Business Workflows
04:18 The Problem with Bolting AI onto Broken Workflows
05:01 The Agentic Foundation (Built in 2025)
05:49 Evolving to the "Renews Teammate" Concept
06:29 Architecture Deep Dive: Supervisor, Planner & Agent Layers
07:51 Introduction of the Planner Node
10:21 Zooming In: How the Supervisor Handles Complex Queries
12:14 Dynamic Replanning & Self-Correction Loops
14:43 Deterministic Task Workflows vs. LLM Reasoning
16:57 The Adoption Plateau: Why Users Ghosted the System
18:11 Forced Curiosity & Evolving from Chatbot to Teammate
18:50 Flipping the Mindset: Humans Help Software, Not Vice Versa
20:29 Key Features: Long-Term Memory, Scheduling & Proactive Intelligence
20:53 Lessons Learned: System Level
21:56 Lessons Learned: Agentic Infrastructure
23:15 Closing Remarks

Extra resources:
• Everything we shipped at Interrupt: https://www.langchain.com/blog/interrupt-2026-overview
• Meet LangSmith Engine: https://www.langchain.com/blog/introducing-langsmith-engine
• About LangChain: https://www.langchain.com/