One of life’s many irritations is calling a service number, reciting account details with a reason for calling to a chatbot, and then being transferred to a human agent and having to repeat everything again. Thanks to the adoption of AI agents for call centers, this teeth-grinding customer experience may soon be a thing of the past.

The contact center has become an early proving ground for autonomous technology. As a result, the customer experience has taken on a whole new meaning in the age of AI, and this has practitioners in the CX world moving quickly to deliver reliable solutions in a rapidly evolving landscape.

During just this week alone, Zoom Inc. unveiled enhanced agentic AI capabilities for its Business Services portfolio to enable connected customer engagements across touchpoints. Customer relationship management powerhouse Salesforce Inc. also introduced Agentforce Contact Center, a solution to unify voice, digital channels, CRM data and AI agents natively in a single system. And RingCentral Inc. launched AIR Pro, an agentic voice AI platform for customer engagement.

The actions of three key industry providers over the past few days offered more than just a glimpse into the next chapter of the customer experience. The latest announcements provided insight into the future role of AI agents themselves.

“We’re at a major inflection point in our industry,” said RingCentral President and Chief Operating Officer Kira Makagon, who spoke during a keynote session at Enterprise Connect in Las Vegas on Wednesday. “We need to go from driving systems to driving transformation.”

Smarter voice agents

If the announcements this week are any indication, that transformation will be driven strongly by applications using autonomous voice. Salesforce’s focus on the contact center includes links between spoken conversation and customer records.

“The ability to get the highest quality voice has become more accessible,” Gautam Vasudev, senior vice president of Agentforce Contact Center and Salesforce Voice, told SiliconANGLE. “Voice agents are becoming smarter and smarter.”

This is about more than an AI-generated voice that sounds uncannily realistic or can converse effortlessly in more than 40 languages. Voice-to-voice predictive models have advanced to the point where AI systems can anticipate vocal, linguistic or social behavior patterns that can enhance how a call is handled.

This ability to comprehend context and emotion is a key ingredient in the recipe for successful handling of a customer call and knowing when a human needs to become involved. “Predictive models are pretty good at understanding how a tone has changed,” Vasudev said. “When a customer is hopping mad, you don’t want to continue the agentic AI engagement.”

Moving from insight to action

AI’s ability to sense when it’s time to move on is a key development in the customer experience industry. Another is being able to act without needing a human at all.

In a briefing for press and analysts prior to Salesforce’s announcement on Tuesday, company executives noted that they had seen 40% to 60% containment with clients in industries such as travel and entertainment. This means the voice agent itself was able to handle a customer request with high quality and without a subsequent escalation.

Salesforce’s Kishan Chetan (center) appeared during Enterprise Connect with Zoom’s Paul Magnaghi and Cisco Webex’s Chang Chang.

Results such as these highlight a central motivation behind the rollout of Agentforce Contact Center. Salesforce is banking on the platform’s ability to use the massive amounts of data generated in customer contacts and become a valuable resource in the enterprise.

“There is so much information in a chat or a phone call,” Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Service, told SiliconANGLE. “Insights are worth pennies, it’s the actions that are worth dollars.”

The ability of AI agents to act in customer call center situations has already transformed one company in the airline industry. Volaris, Mexico’s largest airline, has put into operation its customer system with AI agents to significantly reduce the cost per interaction and lessen the volume of personal interactions for human customer service agents — which, for any airline, can be significant. One Volaris executive described how AI now handled 92% of frequently asked questions over the telephone without human intervention.

Multimodal approach

Numbers such as these point to the growing sophistication of AI models and their ability to make a meaningful difference in customer support. NiCE Ltd. is working with Toyota Motor Co. toward the implementation of a conversational AI solution within the car itself.

An AI agent is directly connected to a car’s onboard electronics, and if an engine warning occurs, customers are immediately contacted by phone to schedule service. This use of AI could soon extend to accident situations, where Toyota’s AI agents can work with a driver’s insurance company on the spot, according to Andy Traba, vice president of product marketing at NiCE, who spoke during a panel session at the conference.

“It’s like providing care in real time,” Traba told attendees. “It’s no longer journeys of chat. It’s becoming much more multimodal.”

QX Now’s Josh Streets (right) spoke with CX expert Justin Robbins and ICMI’s Brad Cleveland during a panel discussion at Enterprise Connect.

Hallway conversations among attendees at Enterprise Connect revealed the conundrum facing AI’s future role in the enterprise and with CX. A number of participants told SiliconANGLE they were in the very earliest stages of AI implementation for their organizations and made the trip to Las Vegas to find out as much as they can.

Yet there was also a feeling of urgency. Whatever the attendees bring back, it’s going to be put into pilot and production as rapidly as possible. CX and AI are now inexorably joined at the hip, according to Josh Streets, founder and chief executive of QX Now.

“AI builds speed, CX builds loyalty, and it’s OK to do both at the same time,” Streets said.

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE