Three insights you might have missed from theCUBE’s coverage of ‘The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit’
SiliconANGLE Manny Veiga ● Covered by 5 sources
AI in contact centers is shifting from faster calls to better fixes. The big test now is whether bots and people can work together without making customers repeat themselves.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Manny Veiga — read the original for the full story.
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At The AI ROI in Contact Center Summit, the message was pretty clear: contact centers are no longer being judged just on speed. The old scoreboard, built around average handle time and first call resolution, is losing weight. What matters more now is whether the customer’s problem actually gets solved. That’s a useful reset, because a short call that leaves the issue hanging is just a faster failure.
Bob Laliberte of theCUBE Research said contact centers are a strong place to prove out agentic AI because they combine huge interaction volumes, high labor costs and very visible failures. When the experience goes wrong, customers notice immediately, trust takes a hit and the brand pays for it. That’s why the event kept circling back to orchestration, not just automation.
Cisco’s Vinod Muthukrishnan pushed that idea further. An AI tool that only answers a question or completes a single transaction is not really agentic, he said. The real goal is to carry conversational context across the full service journey, through whatever front door a customer uses, so the relationship stays intact instead of getting reset at every handoff.
That handoff problem came up again in Zoom’s Ram Rajagopalan’s comments. The ideal is “conversation to completion,” with AI preserving the reason for the call and the needed details before sending it to a human. Joe Rittenhouse of Converged Technology Professionals said the practical starting point is usually the low-hanging fruit, like after-hours coverage, where companies often fall back on a generic mailbox and don’t really know the answer.
And there’s a reason the hybrid model keeps coming up. Five9 CEO Amit Mathradas cited research showing 99% of business practitioners believe AI has improved their contact centers, while only 66% of actual users agree. More than half of those users say the issue is simple: they want a human and can’t reach one. Pedro Andrade of Talkdesk framed the response as CXA, an operating model that coordinates a hybrid workforce by connecting systems, knowledge and workflows. That sounds less glamorous than a chatbot demo, but it’s closer to the real job.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Contact center AI is finally being judged like operations software instead of conference vaporware, which is a relief. The industry spent years worshipping speed and call deflection, then acted surprised when customers still hated repeating themselves. The boring answer is usually the right one: keep the human in the loop, and stop pretending a chatbot is a relationship.
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