BPOs are under pressure. That’s the narrative swirling the CX space over the past 12 months.
For many, generative and agentic AI technologies pose a significant challenge.
Yet, there’s also an opportunity to embrace them, integrate them into their offerings, and commercialize them in a way that delivers added value to the customer experience.
Many BPOs are doing this while managing more high-value transactions that can’t simply be automated away.
Against that backdrop, experts from four prominent BPOs participated in this month’s roundtable. They are:
- Max Schwendner, Co-CEO of Alorica
- John Abou, President of TTEC Engage
- Gurpal Singh, Global Chief Operating Officer at Startek
- Jamie Timm, Chief Delivery Officer at TELUS Digital Solutions
Below, they dive into key industry trends and predict the market’s future.
Customer Experience BPOs: The Trends
Unsurprisingly, one topic dominates: AI. Yet, each expert offers a different take.
Clients No Longer View AI as a Human Replacement
Schwendner: While it is a catchy news headline, our clients no longer view AI as replacing humans. Instead, it’s becoming a force multiplier that supercharges agents with real-time insights, predictive guidance, sentiment analysis, and multilingual capabilities.
The blend of human + AI sets a new standard for speed, accuracy, and personalization in customer interactions.
At Alorica, we’re investing across this spectrum - be it conversational AI with emotional awareness, real-time voice language translation, new ways of handling digital trust & safety, and many others.
Clients Are Taking a Staged, More Thoughtful Approach to AI
Abou: Implementing AI in a dynamic customer experience environment is much harder than many originally thought.
A year ago, companies rushed in thinking it was a plug-and-play solution. What we, at TTEC, are now seeing, and what we hear consistently from clients, is that AI requires far more than a switch-on. It needs clean data, curated knowledge bases, new operating models, and clear guardrails.
Many businesses are pausing, even walking back, to build the right foundations before scaling.
The trend is less about racing to deploy AI and more about taking a staged, thoughtful approach, building strong foundations so that AI enhances associates’ work and improves customer experiences rather than creating new frustrations.
BPOs Are Becoming More Strategic Partners
Singh: Hybrid AI–human operations are moving from pilots to production. Agent copilots, real-time guidance, and automated after call work (ACW) are proving effective at reducing cognitive load, shrinking time to proficiency, and improving consistency across teams.
It’s not bots versus people; it’s orchestration. Automation handles repetitive steps, surfaces context, and flags risk; people bring empathy, judgment, and brand voice to resolve nuanced situations and strengthen loyalty.
Signal-driven operations enable proactive care. Early warning indicators and intent detection trigger outreach before a ticket exists, reducing avoidable contacts and protecting revenue.
BPOs are boosting these strategies, ensuring responsible design becomes operational. Governance, data security, and explainability are embedded into playbooks and QA, ensuring compliant scale without sacrificing customer trust.
Agentic AI Is Transforming the BPO Space
Timm: Unlike GenAI assistants that require user prompts, agentic AI assistants act autonomously, setting their own tasks based on goals.
The technology has significant internal applications for BPOs, from streamlining repetitive and routine workflows, tasks, and decisions to providing live coaching and support for human agents.
Specifically, agentic AI can perform repetitive tasks such as data entry or updating CRM records, and routine decisions like classifying tickets, routing calls, and applying compliance checks.
Also, it proactively manages workflows by monitoring queues, predicting workload spikes, and suggesting staffing adjustments.
Agentic AI applications enable BPOs to move beyond reactive support toward proactive engagement, anticipating customer needs, resolving issues before they surface, and offering timely recommendations.
Finally, this is not about replacing humans, but instead enabling them to focus on what they do best. The future of CX is autonomous, intelligent, and above all, human.
Customer Experience BPOs: The Predictions
From rising contact volumes to a change in the term “contact center”, the experts give their CX predictions and how they’ll impact BPOs.
Customer Engagements Will Rise Because of AI
Schwendner: Transactions will increase as a function of AI, not decrease.
As AI enables a greater degree of personalization and ideally, satisfaction with companies, their customers will request and require even more interactions and data points than ever.