Few parts of a business reflect technological change more directly than the contact center.
In the 1980s and 1990s, enterprises poured money into powerful but painfully rigid on-premise systems.
These platforms were costly to maintain and slow to evolve, but they were the only option for businesses serious about scaling customer service.
The arrival of cloud-based platforms changed the playbook. Suddenly, leaders could experiment with new channels, spin up operations in weeks rather than years, and cut costs without sacrificing capability.
This shift unlocked a new level of agility and quickly became the standard for modern support operations.
Now, if this were Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, this is the part where we’d be entering The Tortured Poets Department era.
Think ‘But Daddy I Love Him’, ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?’, and ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’.
In the contact center space, the equivalent is the AI-first era.
While the entire industry might not be there quite yet, there is an undeniable shift towards AI that doesn’t appear to be showing any signs of slowing down.
However, this time, the path forward is not necessarily linear.
Some organizations aren’t simply migrating from cloud to AI; they’re leapfrogging entire stages of development.
As Jonathan Barouch, Vice President of GM Contact Center at Zendesk, explains:
“The first generation of contact centers were on-prem, the second generation was cloud, and I think the current generation are the ones that were born for the AI era.
“What’s interesting is we’re actually seeing some of the on-prem businesses go straight to AI for their contact centers, essentially bypassing the traditional cloud vendors altogether.”
He likened the current contact center trend to the mobile revolution:
“You’ve got large parts of the developing world that never had a desktop PC; they went straight to mobile.
“I think it’s the same with on-prem contact centers. Customers are missing that middle step and going straight to the end state.”
AI Raises the Stakes
For CX leaders, adopting AI isn’t just about efficiency gains. Instead, they’re rethinking what a ‘good’ customer interaction looks like.
Self-service bots, predictive analytics, and real-time translation are rewriting expectations for speed and accuracy.
But ultimately, customers don’t measure service in terms of resolution times or automation rates; they measure it by how they feel when the conversation ends.
As Barouch puts it:
“What we hear over and over again from customers is the human experience is still really valuable."
“But even with AI-based experiences, they still need to be designed to feel human, not to trick the end customer, but to make the customer feel comfortable.”
That balance is critical.
AI can accelerate repetitive tasks, anticipate customer needs, and even resolve issues before customers notice them. But for complex or high-value interactions, the human touch remains irreplaceable.
The hard part is knowing where to let AI take over, and where to pull a human back in.
Where Zendesk Fits In
Zendesk is positioning itself as a partner for organizations navigating this new landscape.
The company has a strong reputation in digital channels, case management, and knowledge bases.
With the launch of Zendesk for Contact Center, voice joins the portfolio – bringing all channels into a unified platform with AI built at the core.
Barouch highlighted why this matters, explaining that rather than taking customers’ data and exporting it into random AI tools with unknown ROI, AI is built into Zendesk's very core.
The advantage of this approach is apparent when looking at real-world examples.
UK-based BPO Ventrica, working with a global fast-food brand, was able to go live with Zendesk in under a week.
“Normally this is a multi-month lift-and-shift,” Barouch said.
“But because the data, workflows, and knowledge base already lived within Zendesk, it was actually really easy.”
