From reactive to agentic: The next evolution of the contact center
As we near the three-year anniversary of generative AI’s public debut, it seems like every business has rushed out some sort of AI-focused solution. At this point, using AI feels necessary to remain competitive in any space. However, AI alone is not a silver bullet. Organizations that fail to properly prepare for this sophisticated technology will find themselves struggling to make it work as intended. To get the most out of AI, you first need to go back to the basics.
But the AI arms race is still accelerating, and companies now face a defining choice: pursue flashy innovation at all costs or ground their strategies in durable business fundamentals. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in the contact center, where AI is rapidly shifting from novelty to infrastructure. True differentiation lies not in adoption alone, but in seamless, strategic integration.
Begin with the basics
If you want to leverage AI, the most important first step is to know what business problem you want your AI to solve. Implementing AI without first establishing this goal is a recipe for failure. AI should solve an actual issue, not just exist for your marketing team to tout. This is the time to return to your foundational business principles. What value are you looking to provide to your customers, and how can AI help?
Once you’ve identified your problem, focus on your data infrastructure. AI runs on data, and ensuring you have enough clean, relevant data to power your AI is the crucial next step to success. A solid data foundation will help prevent your AI from hallucinating or showing bias and will provide the most accurate outputs. When your data is clean and connected, layering on AI should be a smooth process that results in increased efficiency and streamlined workflows, but keep in mind that refining your fundamentals is essential to do first.
Attempting to rapidly deploy new technologies can sometimes lead to “slower-than-expected adoption,” according to McKinsey, because of implementation challenges. But if you build out your data foundation first, many of these stumbling blocks can be avoided.
The next frontier of AI is agentic
Contact centers increasingly leverage voice AI to handle basic customer queries, but the new wave of agentic AI is transforming service delivery. Unlike earlier generative AI technologies that worked primarily as text generators or content summarizers, agentic AI operates with independent decision-making abilities and can complete a task from start to finish without human intervention, even proactively identifying and resolving customer issues. This streamlined service process is fundamentally shifting how support teams engage with their customers, especially in the contact center.
Since agentic AI will be able to proactively resolve so many customer issues, it will dramatically reduce the workload of human agents. In fact, by 2029, Gartner predicts that up to 80% of common customer service issues will be autonomously resolved by agentic AI. This doesn’t mean human agents are going to become obsolete, but they will have to adapt.
As agentic AI becomes more common, human agents will need to accept that the roles and skills needed to successfully collaborate with the AI systems are going to change, especially as contact centers increasingly become AI-first facilities. But the future of the contact center is still hybrid: The AI will handle repetitive, common issues while humans focus on edge cases that require human empathy and provide strategic support. But collaboration only works if systems are designed to make handoffs to humans seamless. AI must know when to pass the call on and ensure it’s providing the right context to the human who will be handling the call.
Building trust with AI
Because AI proliferated so quickly, many customers now assume some sort of AI is baked into your product — it’s no longer the competitive differentiator it was in 2023. When it comes to agentic AI, many customers won’t know or care about the difference from earlier GenAI tools. They just want the AI they’re interacting with to work.
As people increasingly engage with AI systems that work, their trust in the systems will increase accordingly. To ensure your AI remains trustworthy, it’s critical that it has the proper guardrails in place to keep it accurate and on-track. For example, if a caller gets halfway through their issue and then asks, “Am I talking to a person or AI?”, the AI must respond honestly or risk losing that critical trust.
The contact center is poised for transformation, but the most important element of that transformation is going to be in the preparation. This groundwork hinges on developing the fundamentals: identifying the actual business problem that needs solving and ensuring your underlying data foundation is clean and sound.
Establishing a strong data infrastructure will take a lot of the friction out of adding AI to your tech stack, especially as you get ready for agentic AI. If your AI’s data is good, its outputs will be, too, and the more people interact successfully with this technology, the more they will trust it.
The future of the contact center is here, and it’s a hybrid environment that integrates sophisticated AI agents with an irreplaceable human touch. Ultimately, this AI-human combination will galvanize caller trust and lead to more efficient and effective contact center experiences that improve satisfaction rates and drive long-term success.
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About the Author
Todd Fisher is co-founder and CEO of CallTrackingMetrics. Todd founded the business in 2012 with his wife, Laure, in their basement and together have grown it into a Inc. 500-rated,top-ranked call management platform serving over 30,000 businesses around the world.
Todd developed the initial software and as the CEO he continues to be the driving technical force of the company. Prior to CallTrackingMetrics, Todd co-founded SimoSoftware before selling it to RevolutionHealth in 2005. In 2009, Todd helped co-found Captico LLC, providing online software solutions for small businesses looking to accelerate their marketing and online presence.