Karmactive Team
**What Happens When Your Company Gives You an AI Colleague**
Your email inbox is full. Three applications are open. Someone’s waiting for that report. For decades, office workers have juggled multiple systems just to complete one task. Cisco has begun rolling out MyAgent to its 90,000 employees.
The company launched MyAgent, a personal AI system designed to move beyond answering questions. Unlike a chatbot that responds to prompts, MyAgent is built to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and work through the necessary steps automatically, working across applications like Outlook, Webex, Jira and SharePoint.
Think of it this way: with a chatbot, you ask “how do I schedule this meeting?” With MyAgent, you tell it “schedule this meeting with these participants at this time,” and the system figures out the sequence of steps needed to make it happen.
The distinction matters. MyAgent operates as what Cisco calls a supervised autonomous workflow system. Employees set the objective and desired outcome. Employees remain responsible for intent, judgment and outcomes, while MyAgent operates within Cisco’s governed environment.
This is why Cisco emphasizes the “human-in-the-loop” aspect. The agent works only within systems that employees have already approved. It operates inside what Cisco calls Circuit, the company’s secure AI platform launched in 2023. Cisco had already reported near-universal adoption of Circuit and more than 8 million quarterly interactions before MyAgent.
MyAgent builds on that foundation. The system retains user preferences, past interactions and context. This persistent memory means each interaction with your agent becomes more useful over time, quite different from a standard chatbot that starts largely fresh each time.
The rollout makes MyAgent available across Cisco’s workforce rather than limiting it to a small pilot group.
Cost management is built into the system. Each task an agent performs consumes far more computing resources than a simple chat query. Cisco says this routing approach is intended to manage the computing cost of different types of work. To keep costs manageable, Cisco routes different types of work to different systems: routine tasks get handled by simple automation scripts, mid-complexity work goes to open-source models running on Cisco’s own servers, and only the most complex reasoning gets sent to expensive frontier AI models.
The governance layer is significant for any organization considering similar deployments. MyAgent operates through approved models, systems and enterprise data pathways.
Cisco’s broader strategy provides context for why this matters. In June, the company announced Cloud Control, describing a future where humans and AI agents operate from a common data foundation, with agents able to identify problems, investigate causes and execute fixes while keeping all actions visible.
MyAgent represents an intermediate step in that vision. Not full autonomous operation, but meaningful shift from reactive assistance to active workflow participation. For Cisco’s employees, that distinction is the entire story.
