Ask most contact center leaders how their AI is performing, and there’s a decent chance they genuinely don’t know.
Not because they aren’t paying attention, but because the tools to answer that question properly haven’t really existed… until now.
In a recent conversation with CX Today, Pedro Andrade, VP of AI at Talkdesk, made the case that the biggest obstacle to scaling AI in customer service isn’t the technology itself; it’s visibility. Or rather, the lack of it.
“It’s totally impossible, or irresponsible, not to understand and just trust a black box machine when there is so much at stake,” he said. “There is trust from your customers. There is revenue at stake.”
That concern sits at the heart of Talkdesk’s newly launched CXA Operations Center, a platform designed to give CX teams real-time observability into how AI agents are actually behaving in production.
The solution promises to deliver session-level execution traces, failure diagnostics, and version comparisons – the kind of operational depth that lets teams catch problems before they reach customers at scale.
Andrade was also candid about why so many AI projects underdeliver. He identified two culprits: vendor hype that inflates expectations before deployment, and data that simply isn’t ready for AI.
He gave a telling example of a knowledge base where color-coded text distinguished what agents could and couldn’t share with customers – a system that works fine for humans, but collapses the moment an AI agent enters the picture.
The conversation also covered a metrics problem that doesn’t get nearly enough airtime. As AI handles simpler interactions, average handle time for human agents goes up. This is not because performance is declining, but because the easy stuff has been automated away. Without a hybrid workforce management approach that accounts for this, the ROI story quickly falls apart.
For Andrade, the goal is straightforward: remove the black box, fix the data, and give leaders the tools to scale AI without guessing.
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