Despite the billions of dollars poured into call center automation over the past decade and a half, the majority of contact center interactions remain stubbornly human-to-human. Voice remains the preferred interaction channel – for customers and agents – and agent salaries remain the most expensive part of any contact center operation. For Customer Experience (CX) leaders under pressure to cut costs without sacrificing customer satisfaction, agentic AI provides a compelling solution. Agentic AI automates routine tasks, and escalates complex, emotional, or high-stakes conversations to human agents, freeing them up to focus on situations requiring empathy and reassurance.
Today’s CX leaders face a perfect storm: they are trying to rein in rising contact center costs while agents are on the brink of burnout, and customer satisfaction is ebbing away. High hopes are pinned on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve this picture, with Gartner predicting that, by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention.
However, the reality is more nuanced. CX leaders may be under pressure to move contact center interactions to low-cost digital channels, but it seems that customers have other ideas. A recent survey found that 80% of customer service agents say voice is still their top-used channel every day.
The balancing act
This disconnect highlights a fundamental truth: successful customer experience (CX) strategies must strike a careful balance between leveraging AI and maintaining meaningful human interaction. It also needs to address the crucial issue of trust: the degree of confidence we can have about the responses and decisions made by Gen AI must influence the tasks we delegate to it.
At Orange Business, we believe that Agentic AI, with its ability to orchestrate end-to-end tasks, will have a huge role to play in CX operations moving forward. A recent survey conducted for us by GlobalData found that 29% if respondents are already using Agentic AI, and it is almost certain that the vast majority of CX leaders will follow suit in the next few years.
The agentic approach addresses the concerns outlined above by using strong data orchestration to ensure the AI has a complete, current view of the customer, making recommendations more accurate and personalized, rather than generic. It is also able to evaluate the broader context of a situation, such as customer history, to determine the best course of action.
Our customers are already using our Intelligent Together platform to bridge the gap between automation and human-centric service. Intelligent Together is an orchestrated, conversational AI solution based on Live Intelligence, our turnkey SaaS platform for internal productivity and content creation.
Intelligent Together is tailored for customer-facing, voice-enabled, and complex agentic workflows and provides a secure, multi-LLM environment for deploying conversational AI and agentic telephony while maintaining data privacy and security. This platform enables organizations to deploy, manage, and continuously improve AI agents across multiple channels, including voice-to-voice GenAI, for increased efficiency and reduced agent workload.
Human interaction at the right time
AI-powered bots excel at handling routine, time-consuming tasks – freeing up agents to step in when it matters most. These high-value, high-stress, or high-friction moments often demand the empathy, creativity, and nuanced understanding only a human can provide. The role of AI, therefore, is not to replace human agents, but to augment their capabilities and empower them to deliver exceptional service where it counts.
For example, agentic AI can create a ‘first draft’ of a message to resolve an issue, while keeping humans in the loop for supervision, accountability, and resolving complex, non-linear workflows. Agentic tools can reduce the time agents spend searching for information by up to 30%, allowing them to spend more time on meaningful, high-value customer engagement. It can also automate a significant portion of after-call work (ACW), which is historically one of the most time-consuming tasks for agents.
Agentic Telephony: Making telephony more intelligent with Agentic AI
Agentic telephony provides the same level of assistance for those 80% of customers relying on voice channels by creating an intelligent layer that optimizes the outcome of calls for both callers and agents. By embedding Generative AI and agentic capabilities directly into voice and CRM environments, agentic telephony can handle routine enquiries, understanding context to automate simple approvals and gather relevant information. It is able to provide a certain level of answers, plan the next action, and autonomously manage the entire call journey, while seamlessly escalating complex, emotional, or high-stakes conversations to human agents.
Agentic AI-powered cloud telephony automatically gauges customer emotions in real-time through sentiment analysis, handing off to a human agent when intent confidence drops, sentiment turns negative, or the AI detects high-risk topics like fraud or complex disputes. In these cases, the agentic system provides the human agent with the full context, summary, and conversation history, ensuring the agent seamlessly picks up where the AI left off and that the customer does not have to repeat themselves. The overall benefits of this solution are faster response times, enhanced customer satisfaction through personalization, and optimized costs via smarter resource planning.
Conclusion
As organizations integrate AI into their CX strategy, they face not only technological hurdles but also the challenge of aligning people, processes, and technology. Data silos, fragmented systems, and the proliferation of applications make seamless customer journeys difficult to achieve. The interplay between these systems – and the data that fuels them – determines the quality of the customer experience. Real-time orchestration becomes essential, ensuring that every step is coordinated and that the right information is delivered precisely when needed.
AI’s power lies in its ability to break down these silos and foster agility. Generative AI and agentic AI are increasingly mainstream, with a majority of CX leaders reporting positive impacts. Yet, organizations must also focus on cross-functional collaboration, aligning objectives and accountability to ensure success. The ultimate goal is unified, personalized experiences that drive satisfaction and loyalty – where AI and humans work hand in hand.
The future of customer experience is not about choosing between technology and humanity. It’s about orchestrating both so that customers’ needs are met quickly and effectively, and agents are empowered to deliver empathy and expertise when it matters most. CX leaders should focus on using AI to enhance human connections, creating a dynamic where the right intervention happens at the right time.