Building Your AI Services Practice: Transforming Collaboration in the Age of Intelligence

The AI Revolution: Transforming Business Communication

We stand at the threshold of what I believe is one of the most significant transformations in the history of business communications. Artificial intelligence isn’t merely enhancing our collaboration tools – it’s fundamentally reimagining how we connect, communicate, and create value together.

For our Cisco Collaboration partners, this moment represents both an extraordinary opportunity and a strategic imperative. AI isn’t just transforming collaboration—it’s redefining it. The real question is: how quickly can you position your practice to lead this shift and deliver tangible value to your customers?

The rapid acceleration of AI capabilities we’re witnessing today reminds me of the early days of cloud computing. Many approached it cautiously, seeing it as an incremental technology shift rather than a fundamental business model transformation. Those who recognized its true potential early and adapted their practices accordingly emerged as market leaders. We’re at a similar inflection point with AI in collaboration.

“AI is transforming customer experience, marking the most impactful change in the Contact Center marketplace since the advent of the ACD. Our customers are increasingly aware of this shift. AI enhances agent productivity by automating routine tasks, aids in managing seasonal or event-based surges, and most importantly, it allows for deeper customer personalization through real-time data analysis. This enables businesses to predict customer needs and manage personalized journeys more effectively. The impact of AI is profound and its full potential has yet to be realized.”

— Fred Elliott, Presales Director, Contact Center, Presidio

The Cisco AI Advantage: A High-value Services Opportunity

While many of Cisco’s AI innovations are designed to add intrinsic value to our cloud platform through capabilities like noise cancellation, video framing, “catch me up” functionality, Vidcast, and live translation – making our solutions more valuable to customers right out of the box – the emergence of AI Agent in Contact Center represents a watershed moment for partner services.

As AI Agent moves toward general availability in our Contact Center portfolio, an entirely new services landscape is taking shape, spanning the full lifecycle of AI implementation. Partners can develop high-margin practices around strategic advisory services that help customers reimagine customer experience journeys, design services that translate vision into architecture through knowledge base development and conversational flow design, implementation services that orchestrate complex deployments, ongoing optimization services that continuously refine AI performance, and integration services that connect Cisco’s AI capabilities with specialized language models and enterprise applications. This comprehensive services approach not only creates immediate revenue opportunities but establishes deeper, more strategic customer relationships built around continuous value creation.

Quantifiable Impact: The Business Case for AI in Collaboration

The business case for these services is compelling. Recent Forrester research underscores the transformative potential when customer experience and AI converge:

• Customer acquisition accelerates with a 10% to 40% improvement in sales conversion rates.
• Customer lifetime value expands through a 10% to 30% improvement in annual retention.
• Operational efficiency increases with a 50% improvement in chatbot resolution at contact centers.
• Cost structures improve with a 10% to 50% reduction in calls requiring human agents.

These aren’t incremental improvements – they represent step-changes in business performance that justify significant investment. As partners, your ability to translate these possibilities into customized business cases for your customers will be a key differentiator.

“We started investing over 10 years ago in our AI and Data Science practice, positioning ourselves to seamlessly integrate Gen AI as it emerged. This strategic foresight, combined with our established Contact Center expertise, enables us to guide customers in realizing the benefits and ROI of AI in their Customer Experience. In discussions with clients, AI use cases and productivity enhancements in Contact Centers consistently emerge as top priorities. By leveraging our extensive technical expertise alongside our data advisory and security teams, we help organizations navigate the risks and rewards of implementing these innovative solutions. For partners questioning whether AI presents a genuine service opportunity, the answer is a resounding yes. The time to build these capabilities is now.”

— Joe Berger, Vice President, Digital Experiences, WWT

Beyond Contact Center: The Broader AI Collaboration Canvas

While Contact Center represents an immediate high-value opportunity for AI services, it’s important to recognize the broader transformation occurring across the entire collaboration landscape. Cisco’s approach to AI goes beyond adding standalone features – we’re fundamentally enhancing the intrinsic value of our cloud platform.

Capabilities like intelligent noise cancellation, perfect video framing, meeting summaries, live translation, and asynchronous video through Vidcast are making our solutions more valuable to customers out of the box. For partners, this creates a dual advantage: a more compelling platform to sell (with all the associated profitability) alongside new services opportunities.

The increasing intelligence of the platform itself also creates a foundation for partners to build specialized solutions for industry-specific workflows, custom integrations with business applications, and tailored experiences that address unique customer needs.

Building Your AI Practice: A Strategic Approach

For partners contemplating how to build their AI services practice, I recommend a strategic approach that balances immediate opportunity capture with sustainable capability building:

1. Start with your strengths. Identify where your existing expertise – whether in certain industries, use cases, or technical domains – intersects with emerging AI opportunities.
2. Invest in foundational knowledge. Ensure your team understands both the technical capabilities of Cisco’s AI solutions and the business outcomes they enable.
3. Develop a tiered services portfolio. Create a structured progression of services that allows customers to start with quick wins while building toward comprehensive transformation.
4. Establish ethical guidelines. Develop clear frameworks for addressing data privacy, security, transparency, and bias in AI implementations.
5. Build showcase environments. Create demonstration capabilities that allow customers to experience the potential of AI-enhanced collaboration firsthand.

The Path Forward: From Features to Outcomes

As we move forward, the most successful partners will be those who shift their positioning from technology providers to business transformation enablers. The conversation must evolve from features to outcomes, from products to possibilities.

This isn’t simply about selling new technology – it’s about helping customers reimagine how work happens, how customer relationships are nurtured, and how organizations create value in an AI-enhanced world.

The partners who thrive in this new landscape will be those who combine technical expertise with strategic vision, who balance innovation with ethical responsibility, and who recognize that AI isn’t just changing what collaboration technology can do – it’s transforming what it means to collaborate.

The future of collaboration is intelligent, intuitive, and immensely powerful. The time to build your AI services practice isn’t coming – it’s now. This comprehensive resource offers technical specifications, implementation guidance, and demonstration tools that will help you build compelling service offerings and showcase the transformative potential to your customers.

Are you ready to lead? The tools, the platform, and the opportunity await.

To jumpstart your journey into AI-powered collaboration, explore Cisco’s AI Agent capabilities at cisco.webex.ai/ai-agent.

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