The State of AI in the Contact Center Research Report

Overview

How AI is used in contact centers is changing at incredible speed, and these changes require contact center leaders to understand how these tools and capabilities can help optimize productivity, costs, and both the customer and agent experiences.

ICMI recently surveyed the contact center community to better understand the current and planned deployment of AI-powered tools in the contact center. This executive summary presents the findings, focusing on where organizations and contact centers of various sizes and with variable budgets are placing their AI bets — and who’s making these decisions.

How AI is used in contact centers is changing at incredible speed. This report provides a snapshot in time as AI-powered contact center tools emerge from their early, experimental status and take an increasingly central role across all areas of contact center operations. This research makes it clear that excellent service – and all the attendant reputation, loyalty, and revenue benefits those service experiences unlock – are the result of appropriate and well-timed investments in optimizing productivity, costs, and both the customer and agent experiences.

From this point forward, a majority of those investments will be focused on understanding, selecting, and managing AI-enabled capabilities. Otherwise, when customer service suffers because leading-edge technologies aren’t fit for contact center-specific purposes, whole organizations are going to lose competitive ground, with some of them losing it forever.