Every conference about contact centre technology includes at least one presentation about AI replacing human agents. It’s a compelling narrative that drives anxiety among frontline workers and speculation among investors. But how accurate is it?
The honest answer is: some jobs will be automated, and many jobs will change. But the picture is more nuanced than the “robots taking jobs” headline suggests.
What Will Be Automated
The interactions most likely to be fully automated are the highly structured, information-intensive ones: checking an account balance, getting a status update, confirming an address, paying a bill. These are interactions where the customer needs information, not empathy — where the value of human contact is low and the value of speed and availability is high.
For these interactions, automation is already happening. IVR systems have been handling simple enquiries for decades. Natural language interfaces make those systems more capable. Virtual agents like Tulip AI extend the range of what can be handled without human involvement.
What Won’t Be Automated
The interactions that remain with humans are the ones where the human element is genuinely valuable: complex situations with multiple variables, emotionally charged conversations, edge cases that fall outside standard processes, and interactions where building trust and relationship matters.
These interactions are a smaller proportion of total volume but a larger proportion of total value. An agent who handles only these interactions is doing more skilled, more meaningful work — and delivering more value per interaction.
The Net Outcome
The best evidence from industries that have already gone through significant automation suggests that while automation displaces some jobs, it also creates new ones — in managing and improving the automated systems, in handling the more complex interactions that automation can’t handle, and in the broader ecosystem of technology development and deployment.
The contact centre of the future will have fewer agents handling routine interactions and more agents — and more skilled agents — handling complex ones. That’s not necessarily a bad outcome for the people who work in contact centres, but it does require adaptation and investment in skills development.
