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In this guest blog post, Richard Henke, head of marketing at Bucher + Suter, explains what’s feasible today and what to consider now when planning for a future of AI-augmented or AI-led contact centers. Bucher + Suter is a Microsoft partner offering its b+s Connects for Cisco Contact Center solution in Microsoft AppSource.

Two things can be true at once.

First, the shift toward AI-led contact centers is in full swing, accelerated by generative and agentic AI. With impressive results, too: We’ve seen contact center AI lower call volume, cut wait times, and reduce costs—sometimes in compressed timeframes.

Then again, the replacement of live-agent calls remains a choice, as opposed to an inevitability. At least as it stands. Today, 71 percent of Gen Z respondents still think live calls are the quickest and fastest way to explain their problem. Among Baby Boomers, that percentage rises to 94 percent.

Which brings us to the real question: Does replacing live-agent calls with AI make sense within your contact center? If so, how prepared are you to do so? If not, what’s the way forward?

Here’s a few things to consider.

The difference between what’s possible and what’s needed

What used to be theoretical is now technically feasible. Service leaders can build an autonomous AI support agent capable of handling calls that would have otherwise gone to a live agent. Agentic AI makes it possible to train multiple agents that handle various tasks and workflows all on their own.

But integrating agentic AI means first having a few pieces in place, including:

1. Multi-agent system architecture: Agentic AI can sense, reason, and plan. It can coordinate, execute, learn, and adapt. Ensuring it does so in a secure, scalable way requires considerable technical considerations, such as large language model (LLM) integration and data processing, for which a customer service organization may not yet be ready.
   
   


2. Service model updates: Gartner predicts that agentic AI will eventually handle 80 percent of common customer service issues autonomously. Getting there will require significant revisions to existing service models. This includes adapting the model to handle service volume with AI and route interactions appropriately.
   
   


3. Increasing complexity for agents: Freeing up agents to work on more complex issues is a major selling point for AI-led automation—84 percent of contact center leaders already expect their agents to do so this year. But only 22 percent feel certain that their teams are ready to excel under this new model.
   
   


4. Accuracy, relevance, governance, and security: Deploying AI isn’t a guarantee of quality and control. It needs retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to improve performance. It may need a dedicated solution for AI security and governance. And perhaps most importantly, it needs quality organizational data.

Understandably, many business leaders have yet to commit to AI, let alone agentic AI. A KPMG AI Quarterly Pulse Survey found that only 12 percent of surveyed executives and business leaders had deployed AI agents.

AI enhancement before total displacement

Instead of the total displacement of live-agent interactions, technology platforms are taking steps to make the existing service journey far more intelligent.

How?

By integrating GenAI enhancements throughout self-service (intelligent assistance) and the assisted-service layer (unified routing and agent assistance). That way, both customers and agents can tap into the personalization, relevance, and automation at every touch point.

With respect to the assisted service, technology platforms have evolved to make agents more productive when human interaction is required. This includes seamless handoff from interactive voice recognition (IVR), recommended answers, and job-specific automations, based on integrated systems and data. Webex Contact Center is a good example. Its Agent Assist, AI Agent, and AI Assistant are built to significantly augment agent productivity.

A way forward for on-premises solutions

Bucher + Suter’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Integration is built specifically with Cisco Contact Center implementations in mind. b+s Connects for Cisco Contact Center in Microsoft AppSource is one of the most robust and complete integrations on the market, including:

• Configurable lookup on customer objects


• Pre-populated Dynamics 365 call activities


• Real-time display based on Finesse data


• Supervisor features, e.g. monitor or barge-in


• Dynamics 365 Multisession App support


• Calabrio call recording integration

With Cisco making new AI features available to the contact center, b+s will be bringing that intelligence into the platform when Microsoft makes the APIs available later this year. For example, we’ll be pulling in transcription data that will help drive better contact center experiences from the contact center agent desktop, all built into Dynamics 365.

A wide world of AI-enhanced use cases

Beyond in-the-flow agent experience enhancements, our top priority is to bring AI into a variety of additional use cases, such as agent training and onboarding, workflow automations, supervisor analytics, and performance reporting.

One area of note is agent well-being. Webex’s AI Assistant can trigger actions based on burnout indicators (call metrics and transcription data), such as automatic breaks or schedule changes. Yet another example of technology platforms focusing on making like better for agents first, before jumping to outright replacement.

Takeaway: material reality supersedes hype cycles

There’s what may happen in the future and what service leaders must work with now.

Namely, service leaders must find cost-efficient ways to integrate AI with existing systems and architecture. And they must do so without discarding the customer-first, agent-empowered approach.

For some contact centers, that may mean fully autonomous agents, handling specific use cases, right now. But “AI will replace live-agent calls” frames it as a looming wave soon to inevitably crash down and force wholesale change. Until that moment comes, the more realistic outcome is augmentation, aka AI-led contact centers.

As to what extent, it will likely vary from environment to environment, from customer base to customer base.

Visit the b+s Connects for Cisco Contact Center in Microsoft AppSource page on Microsoft AppSource or click here to build a personalized demo of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration for Cisco Contact Center.

Learn more about the b+s Connects solution here.