All work
CISCO COLLABORATION / AI STRATEGY & GOVERNANCE

The agentic future
of Control Hub.

Defining how AI supports administrative work inside Control Hub and through external agents, with clear boundaries for permissions, confirmation, and execution.

MY ROLE

AI Strategy Lead / AI UX Lead

FOCUS

Agentic administration & AI governance

PROJECT STAGE

Strategy, research & prototypes

Location-comparison exploration in the working prototype. Yankun Wang set up the prototype and led its design and implementation.
01 / THE OPPORTUNITY

Defining how AI supports
administrative work.

The opportunity was to rethink how administrators accomplish work while maintaining enterprise trust, governance, and control.

Enterprise administrators navigate fragmented management experiences. As AI assistants and agentic systems emerged, administration also began to extend beyond a single application: work could happen inside Control Hub, through an external assistant, or across both.

I defined the agentic administration vision and AI governance strategy, facilitated leadership alignment workshops, and partnered with product and engineering on roadmap direction.

THE CENTRAL DESIGN QUESTION

How can administrative capabilities extend across AI experiences while Control Hub remains a trusted management layer?

02 / STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK

Connecting AI experiences
across two surfaces.

My current playbook defines two surfaces: embedded AI inside Control Hub and extended capabilities in external agents. The hybrid model describes the handoff between them, with a shared approach to authority and oversight.

01

Embedded

Bring AI directly into Control Hub. Use collaboration data and administrative context to help people understand their environment, troubleshoot issues, and move from recommendations to plans and action.

INTELLIGENCE WITHIN THE PRODUCT
02

Extended

Bring Control Hub capabilities into external AI platforms. External agents can explain, investigate, and recommend through MCP and MCP Apps. Consequential actions cross-launch to Control Hub for confirmation and execution.

CAPABILITIES BEYOND THE PRODUCT
03

Hybrid

Connect both models. Allow work to move between Control Hub and external AI systems while preserving governance, trust, and visibility.

CONTROL ACROSS EVERY SURFACE

The future was not a choice between Embedded and Extended. It required both, with a consistent approach to enterprise oversight.

03 / EMBEDDED EXPLORATION

Make the strategy
something people can use.

Yankun Wang set up the working prototype and led its design and implementation. The team used it to explore how AI could understand administrative context, recommend actions, create plans, and safely execute work. It moved the conversation beyond a conventional chatbot and into realistic administrative workflows.

The prototype supported stakeholder discussions, design reviews, and alignment around future roadmap investments. It was an exploration tool, rather than a production-ready design.

Rachael Marr

AI STRATEGY LEAD / AI UX LEAD

Defined the framework and future vision, created the Agentic UX playbook site, and guided reviews and stakeholder alignment. Shared guidelines were authored by a colleague.

Yankun Wang

AI UX DESIGNER

Set up the prototype and led its design and implementation. Primary credit for the functional prototype belongs to Yankun, including the foundation used for these agentic workflow explorations.

Check out Yankun’s portfolio too

04 / EXTENDED RESEARCH

What makes an agent
safe to adopt?

Unlike conventional software, agentic applications can evolve, gain capabilities, access tools, and act on behalf of users. We researched enterprise administrators, collaboration engineers, and developers to understand the mental models and governance needs this introduced.

I synthesized research findings and customer feedback into governance strategy, UX concepts, and administrative workflows.

01

Explain capabilities, not technical structures.

Participants struggled with terms such as tools and schemas. They wanted to know what an app could do, which systems it could access, and which actions it could perform.

Design direction: Translate technical structures into capability-based explanations of outcomes and risk.

02

Make change visible.

Administrators wanted to understand what changed after deployment, which capabilities were added, and what new risks they were accepting.

Design direction: Surface meaningful differences through change-review and approval workflows.

03

Govern at organizational scale.

Enterprise rollout needs extended beyond individual users. Participants expected pilot groups, staged rollouts, bulk permissions, and organization-wide governance.

Design direction: Support validation before broad deployment through scalable access and rollout controls.

04

Show ownership and accountability.

Administrators needed to know who owned an application, who supported it, where documentation lived, and who was responsible for approvals.

Design direction: Make organizational responsibility part of the management experience.

05 / AGENTIC UX PLAYBOOK

Turning the strategy into
a practical design playbook.

I created an internal Agentic UX playbook to make the strategy usable by design, product, engineering, and platform teams.

I authored the strategy, audience framing, use-case work, audit and traceability model, and reusable skill packaging, and created the site that brings them together. The shared guidelines were authored by a colleague; I incorporated them into the playbook with that contribution distinguished from my own.

The shared workflow moves from understanding the goal and scope, to deciding on a plan, acting with the right authority, and returning a result the admin can verify.

Defining what external agents can do

I organized extended capabilities into five levels: public information, read-only admin context, troubleshooting, recommendations and preparation, and reserved execution. External experiences can support understanding and preparation. Changes such as restart, policy edits, access changes, remediation, and rollback remain on a Cisco-controlled surface.

Before action, Control Hub rechecks identity, scope, permissions, and current state. The experience keeps edits, approvals, denials, and outcomes traceable.

The strategy distinguishes information and recommendations from consequential actions that require Cisco-controlled execution.
The strategy distinguishes information and recommendations from consequential actions that require Cisco-controlled execution. Select the image to view at full size.

Applying the model to administrative use cases

The playbook organizes work around dependencies, comparison, clone and copy, and configuration. The supplied dependencies example makes the model concrete: an admin asks what would be affected before deleting a virtual line.

The proposed response identifies related objects, explains the scope and coverage of the inspection, and states that nothing has changed. It offers a separate deletion plan as a next step rather than treating the question as permission to delete.

This is a draft experience specification, not a released feature or a measured user outcome.

Draft dependencies use case: inspect relationships and potential impact before planning a change.
Draft dependencies use case: inspect relationships and potential impact before planning a change. Select the image to view at full size.
06 / AUDIT & TRACEABILITY

Keeping administrative actions
traceable across surfaces.

I defined a shared audit model that captures who requested, approved, and executed an action; what changed; why it was authorized; and the outcome, including rollback state.

Control Hub owns the authoritative record. The embedded experience provides the full log for investigation. An external agent provides a concise action receipt with status, a shared trace ID, and a link back to the full record.

The model distinguishes reads from writes. Read-only responses return provenance, scope, and freshness. Recommendations carry the rationale and trace ID into the next step. Edits and remediation create the formal record in Control Hub.

My audit model connects a full Control Hub record with concise receipts in external experiences.
My audit model connects a full Control Hub record with concise receipts in external experiences. Select the image to view at full size.
07 / REUSABLE TEAM RESOURCE

Making the playbook available
throughout the design process.

I packaged the playbook as a portable skill so teams can bring the strategy into AI-assisted design and engineering workflows. The site presents it as a downloadable SKILL.md containing the shared model, strategy, behaviors, use cases, references, and agent guidelines.

It is intended to support alignment before design, critique during development, and checks of handoff, recovery, traceability, and the result before launch. The packaging is my work; the included shared guidelines retain my colleague’s authorship.

This is a resource I’m developing and working with teams to adopt. As we begin supporting edit capabilities, Yankun Wang is reviewing audit logging. Adoption and audit design are ongoing; their effect on delivery has not yet been measured.

The playbook site presents a portable skill for use before design, during critique, and before launch.
The playbook site presents a portable skill for use before design, during critique, and before launch. Select the image to view at full size.
08 / STRATEGIC IMPACT

Giving teams a framework
for reviewing agentic work.

The work established a framework for trustworthy enterprise AI administration and influenced roadmap discussions across AI and administrative initiatives.

  • Created an internal playbook connecting strategy, use-case specifications, authority boundaries, audit design, and reusable skill packaging.
  • Aligned design, product, and engineering around a shared agentic administration vision.
  • Made complex AI concepts tangible through realistic workflows and prototypes.
  • Validated the vision and interaction patterns through customer research, usability sessions, and conversations at Cisco Live.
  • Explored how reasoning, orchestration, governance, and human oversight could work together.
CONTINUING THE WORK

As the technology evolves, customer validation, executive reviews, and Cisco Live conversations continue to challenge assumptions and shape the direction.

THE TAKEAWAY

Designing agentic AI means defining
an interaction model people can trust.

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