THE AGENTS WHO WILL THRIVE IN AN AI-AUGMENTED CONTACT CENTER ARE THE ONES WHO CAN HANDLE THE INTERACTIONS AI CANNOT: THE COMPLEX, THE EMOTIONAL, THE NOVEL, THE HIGH-STAKES.
PUTTING THE PLAYBOOK IN PRACTICE
The pressure to deploy AI agents at speed is real. A Gartner survey found that 77 % of customer service and support leaders are feeling it from their own senior executives( Gartner, October 2025). The pressure will only intensify as agentic AI capabilities expand.
• Who set production-readiness thresholds before they ran their pilots?
• Who governed their AI agents with the same rigor they applied to their human workforce?
• Who brought their teams along rather than presenting them with a fait accompli?
AI AGENTS
The Klarna story( see BOX) is instructive because the reversal was avoidable. The cost savings were real. The quality deterioration was also real. A more deliberate deployment strategy would have captured most of the former while preventing most of the latter.
The goal is not to choose between cost efficiency and customer experience. The goal is to deploy AI agents in a way that delivers both.
The Gartner survey cited above confirms where AI deployments should be focused. The highest-value use cases are agent assist, self-service, operations automation, and agentic AI, not, and in my view, mass agent elimination.
I spent years driving toward that 95 % CSAT score at Autodesk by treating every customer interaction as a signal worth listening to. AI agents do not change that discipline. They scale it, if you govern them well enough to let them.
The technology is ready. The question is whether your deployment strategy is.
But the leaders who will succeed are the ones who defined their customer interaction portfolio before they defined their use cases:
Reddy Mallidi is Chief AI Officer & COO at J & R Consulting and author of Leading With AI Agents(# 1 Amazon Bestseller) and AI Unleashed. A former operations and technology executive at Autodesk, ADP, and Intel, he advises Fortune 2000 companies on AI strategy, implementation, and governance.
This month, Mark shares Part 3 of his Coaching series, Average Handle Time vs. Human Time. Don’ t Miss Part 1, published in the May issue and Part 2, published in the June issue. 22 CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE