There's a version of the AI conversation in the contact center that, to put it bluntly, has been done to death.
We’ve all heard about the productivity gains, the cost efficiencies, and the agent experience improvements.
That’s not to say that these aren’t important and real. But there's a harder conversation that tends to get glossed over around what happens to a contact center's oversight infrastructure when a growing share of its workforce isn't human?
Because that's the reality right now. AI agents are no longer a pilot project or a proof of concept. They're handling real customer interactions at scale every day in some of the largest contact centers in the world.
And most organizations are navigating that reality with frameworks, metrics, and oversight structures that were built entirely around human agents.
Indeed, one of the more underappreciated side effects of AI taking on customer interactions is what it leaves behind for human agents.
The transactions handled by agentic bots tend to be simpler. This point came up in a recent CX Today discussion with Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, who said:
“What's left for the human agents are actually the harder bits of work.”
That might sound like a clean division of labor, but the downstream implications for how contact centers support and evaluate their human workforce are significant.
If agents are increasingly handling complex, emotionally charged, or high-stakes conversations, the benchmarks and coaching structures built around a far broader interaction mix may no longer reflect what's actually being asked of them.
Who's Watching the Machines?
In a hybrid contact center environment, the management challenge now incorporates both human and AI agents. And this is where, according to Rennyson, most organizations have a real blind spot.
In many deployments, the instinct is to treat AI agents as self-regulating. Systems that either work or don't, and that can be assessed by outcomes alone.
Rennyson pushes back hard on that:
“If you're going to take the leap that conversational AI is able to have a much more durable, thorough, and consistent conversation on par with humans for certain types of tasks, then you need to be managing and quality managing these conversations the same way.”