In this interview, CX Today’s Rhys Fisher sits down with Hakob Astabatsyan, CEO of Synthflow AI, off the back of the company’s newly announced strategic partnership with 8×8.
Astabatsyan explains what the integration means in practice for enterprise contact centers, specifically the ability to deploy AI agents across voice, chat, and digital channels without developer support, and without the long implementation cycles that have historically slowed AI adoption.
The conversation moves quickly into territory that goes beyond the partnership announcement. Astabatsyan makes a pointed distinction between what most AI solutions actually deliver and what Synthflow is going after.
Most platforms, he argues, are built around deflection. Synthflow’s agents are designed for something harder: end-to-end resolution across complex, multi-step interactions, with memory that persists across conversations over days or weeks.
He’s also direct on the ROI question, pushing back on the idea that cost savings are still the primary selling point for AI in the contact center.
“All these things before – saving time and reducing costs, deflecting the number of calls – it has been all about single-digit ROI cases,” Astabatsyan says.
“But moving to this new way of actually increasing the revenue, and the conversions, and the outcomes, this has shifted for many CX leaders from single-digit to double-digit ROI, because this is very measurable. It’s in dollars and conversion rates.”
Astabatsyan also shares his view on where conversational AI is heading next, including the move toward fully autonomous end-to-end workflows and the outcome-based pricing model Synthflow has built around that vision.
