Thrive’s Scott Steele offers commentary on how employees and AI agents collaborate in contact centers. This article originally appeared in Insight Jam, an enterprise IT community that enables human conversation on AI.
In 2025, organizations are racing to adopt AI tools – not just for efficiency, but to fundamentally reshape operations. While gains in productivity are expected, the real surprise lies in the sheer versatility of AI across use cases like customer service, data analysis, and process automation.
One such use case is contact center automation. Depending on the size, companies can receive hundreds, if not thousands, of calls and messages per day. Many of these are repetitive – simple questions that could, in theory, have simple answers. Queries like, “What’s my account balance?” or “Can you explain the increase in my last bill?” require the same set of steps and responses – but have, to date, required a human due to the personal nature of the call and question.
Today, AI agents – an emerging technology with the power to personalize communications, reason, and deviate based on new or nuanced information – can slot into this role and take a lot of this repetitive work off employee shoulders, routing only the complex or emotionally charged cases to human staff. As such, AI agents offer an unprecedented advantage to organizations who see the transformative potential of holistic staffing: leveraging AI to its best advantage while upskilling and reskilling their human workforce toward a better future.
Benefits of AI in Contact Centers
Customers continue to expect more from their customer service experiences. They increasingly want a quick, personalized, and actionable response to their questions no matter what time of day or night, according to Calabrio research. To date, chatbots and phone trees have offered a frustratingly incomplete stopgap for round-the-clock support. Instead, they often created friction – looping menus, irrelevant suggestions, or dead ends that frustrated rather than helped users.
Today, AI agents take this automated support idea to the next level. They can quickly and efficiently pull information, analyze it for relevance to the question, and make decisions based on nuanced input with zero wait time. This boosts the customer experience, reduces the number of redundant tasks, and improves the overall bottom line for organizations who embrace it.
The proof is in the numbers: According to industry experts, successful AI agent implementation drives increased customer satisfaction scores and can reduce the cost per call by 50 percent. A win-win for both customer and company alike.
The Case for Upskilling Employees
With 98 percent of contact centers already using AI in some capacity, the question is no longer whether to adopt – but how to do so intelligently. For AI to reach its full potential, it must work in harmony with a well-prepared human workforce. To prepare teams, it’s important to first recognize where employees will hold a lasting advantage over AI: namely, soft skills and critical thinking.
Strategically implementing AI means optimizing it for the tasks it handles best, freeing teams to leverage their humanity in new and better ways. Offloading routine tasks to AI means teams can focus on high-value, soft skill-based responsibilities.
However, this creates a new problem: employees are increasingly responsible for harder, more emotionally charged conversations and tasks with little-to-no additional training to support this higher-level role according to early reports. This skill gap is just coming to light and offers an example of why organizations need to prioritize upskilling and training, so teams and organizations alike are better prepared for the workplace of the future.
Tasks to consider for a future-proof upskilling program include:
Building client rapport and trust: For high-level client relationships, people are better suited to establish trust and build relationships. Empathy training can better leverage soft skills for client-facing roles, such as sales or customer success for the cases that matter most.
Escalations and problem solving: While basic queries can be handled without human intervention in most cases, there will always be exceptions that need a personal touch. Critical thinking, reasoning, and outside-the-box problem-solving give employees the permanent upper hand in these instances. AI can handle initial interactions, but well-trained human agents offer a resource for nuanced or emotionally complex escalations and problem-solving needs.
AI use and troubleshooting: No technology is perfect, and it’s important to have employees who understand it well enough to step in when something goes wrong. AI training and troubleshooting skills are sure to help future-proof your organization.
While AI has a lot to offer the organizations who lean into it, there’s no denying that your employees are and will remain your greatest asset. Upskilling and cross training your teams for a future-proof workforce will have a dramatic impact on operational efficiency, overall customer satisfaction, and the organization’s bottom line.