TECHNOLOGY DEPLOYMENT
BY CHARLIE ADAMS, CUSTOM CONNECT
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE STOCK
STOP DEPLOYING AI IN YOUR CONTACT CENTER!
There has never been more enthusiasm for AI in the contact center. There has also never been more waste. The gap between those two facts is where most organizations currently live.
AI deployment in contact center operations is failing, not because the technology is flawed, but because the thinking behind it is.
Boards are mandating it. Vendors are overselling it. And operations leaders, caught between pressure from above and skepticism from their teams, are implementing it in ways that solve nothing and sometimes actively make things worse.
This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument against deploying it badly.
28 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
UNTIL YOU’ VE READ THIS ARTICLE.
THE FOMO TRAP IS REAL AND EXPENSIVE
The pressure to“ do AI” has become almost indistinguishable from the pressure to be seen doing it. Announcements on LinkedIn. Slide decks with capability roadmaps. Vendor partnerships marketed as transformation.
Behind a significant number of those announcements is a story that goes quietly untold:
• The chatbot that increased customer effort.
• The AI routing layer that confused agents.
• The automation project that required a manual workaround within six weeks.
Fear of missing out( FOMO) is not a strategy. When the stated business case for AI investment is“ our competitors are doing it,” that is the moment to pause, not accelerate.
The contact centers seeing genuine ROI from AI are not the ones that moved fastest. They are the ones that were most deliberate. They started with a problem, not a product. They defined what success looked like before they signed anything. And they measured relentlessly.