Welcome to Edition 8 of AI-Decoded.
In this final edition of AI-Decoded, our CEO Oliver Lennon explores a question that challenges one of the most established assumptions in customer experience.
For decades, organizations have invested heavily in contact centers, continuously improving the technology, processes and channels that support them.
But what if we have been optimizing the workaround rather than solving the underlying problem?
As AI gives customers direct access to knowledge, expertise and business processes, Oliver examines whether the future of customer service is not a better contact center, but a world where the contact center itself becomes increasingly unnecessary.
The Contact Centre Was a Workaround
For more than fifty years, organizations have invested billions building contact centers.
What if the contact center was never the answer?
What if it was simply the best workaround available at the time?
The contact center became the bridge between customers and information.
Artificial intelligence may remove the need for that bridge.
From the large telephone operations of the 1970s and 1980s through to today’s cloud contact centers, the model has remained remarkably consistent:
- Customers contact the organization.
- An agent answers.
- The agent acts as the bridge between the customer and the knowledge, systems and expertise that sit elsewhere in the enterprise.
Customer information lived in filing cabinets, internal systems and the heads of experienced employees. The only practical way to serve millions of customers was to create dedicated teams whose job was to access that information on behalf of customers.
Technology has evolved continuously. The underlying model has not.
But for the first time, AI is creating the conditions for something fundamentally different. Not a better contact center. A world where the contact center itself may no longer be required.
The Strange Contradiction at the Heart of Customer Service
There is a stark reality that has existed for decades. The customer is the most valuable asset any organization has – if you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business. Acquiring and retaining customers is the single most important factor that determines the success of a business. Yet when customers need help, organizations often place them in front of the least experienced employees, the lowest paid employees and the employees with the highest levels of attrition.
Rows of agents sit in large buildings handling calls, emails and messages. Training never stops. Staff turnover remains high. Knowledge constantly needs to be transferred from experienced employees into scripts, processes and training programmes.
No other critical business relationship is managed this way. Imagine if every strategic supplier was managed by the newest employee in procurement. Or every investor call was handled by the most junior finance team member.
Yet that is effectively what customer service has done for decades. The model has survived because it was economically efficient. Not because it was ideal.
We have accepted this model for so long that it feels normal.
It isn’t!
No organization would deliberately place its newest employees between its most valuable customers and the expertise needed to solve their problems if there was a better alternative.
Technology Never Really Changed the Model
I have worked in the industry as a technology vendor for over two decades. I’ve seen it firsthand, the contact center industry has experienced wave after wave of innovation. From Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) and IVR through to workforce management, CTI, digital engagement and omnichannel platforms, the list of innovations is extensive.
Yet almost all of this innovation focused on one objective – making the contact center more efficient.
- How do we route calls faster?
- How do we manage agent workloads better?
- How do we reduce handling times?
- How do we lower the cost per contact?
The customer still entered the same process. A human “middle person” remained responsible for connecting customers to organizational knowledge.
AI Changes the Equation
For the first time, customers can interact directly with an intelligence layer capable of understanding intent, searching enterprise information, accessing systems and helping execute business processes.
Importantly, AI, or more specifically agentic AI, is not replacing organizational knowledge. It is surfacing that knowledge to help customers. The information needed to solve customer problems already exists. It lives inside enterprise systems, knowledge bases, policies, procedures, databases and the expertise of employees.
Historically, customers required agents to access that information. But that is not set to last.
The Future Is Direct Access to Knowledge
For decades contact center agents acted as knowledge brokers. Their primary role was not to possess expertise themselves, but to navigate systems, processes and organisational structures on behalf of customers.
Most discussions about AI focus on creating more capable virtual agents or more efficient contact centers.
The bigger opportunity may be far more disruptive. The future may not revolve around contact centers at all. Instead, AI becomes the front door to organizational knowledge.
Customers receive direct access to the information, processes and expertise required to achieve their desired outcome. The goal is no longer handling contacts. The goal is delivering a resolution.
When a customer needs information about a bill, AI connects them to the relevant information. When they want to upgrade a product, AI accesses the relevant offers and processes.
When they need help resolving a complex issue, AI determines who within the organization is best positioned to help. Not the next available contact center agent, but rather the best available expert.
As AI becomes better at knowledge brokerage, the need for dedicated human knowledge brokers begins to decline.
A Different Workforce Model
This is where the future becomes particularly interesting. If AI can connect customers directly to knowledge, then the role of the traditional contact center agent begins to change. Human expertise does not disappear; it becomes more important.
But customers may no longer need to speak to a dedicated customer service representative. Instead, AI can identify and connect customers with the most appropriate person across the entire organization.
That person might be a product specialist; an engineer; a salesperson or a vice-president. Whoever is best placed to resolve the issue. Customer service stops being the responsibility of a specific department and instead it becomes the responsibility of the entire organization.
The End of the Contact Centre?
This idea will sound radical to many people working within the industry. Yet the contact center itself was a solution to a technology limitation. It existed because customers could not easily access organizational knowledge directly.
AI is beginning to remove that limitation. As it does, the rationale for maintaining large teams of employees whose primary role is knowledge brokerage starts to weaken.
The contact center does not disappear overnight. But over time, it may evolve from being the center of customer service into one component of a much broader organizational capability.
By 2035, I believe many large enterprises will employ fewer traditional contact center agents than they do today. Not because customer service becomes less important, but because AI will connect customers directly to knowledge and expertise across the organization.
Final Thought
For decades, businesses have optimized customer service around efficiency. The future will be defined by expertise.
The old model was simple:
- Customer → Agent → Enterprise Knowledge
The emerging model looks very different:
- Customer → AI → Enterprise Knowledge and Expertise
The difference sounds subtle, but in reality, it changes everything.
That shift changes the role of technology and it changes the role of employees. Rows of agents answering phones were a solution to the limitations of information access. As AI removes those limitations, the need for the contact center as we know it may disappear.
It also follows the pattern we’ve seen throughout history. Entire industries are often built around overcoming a limitation of the time. When the limitation disappears, the industry has to reinvent itself. Think about travel agents. They existed because customers couldn’t easily access airline schedules, pricing and booking systems. The internet removed that information bottleneck. Travel didn’t disappear. Travel agents largely did.
I believe that that contact centers are facing a similar moment.
The contact center was a necessary solution to an information access problem. AI is solving the information access problem. The question every enterprise should now be asking is simple:
What happens when customers no longer need the workaround?
Throughout this AI-Decoded series, we’ve explored how AI is moving from experimentation into operational reality – from orchestration and integration to governance, agentic AI and the future of customer experience. If there is one theme that connects every edition, it is this: the organisations that succeed will be those willing to rethink assumptions, not simply automate them.
If you’re actively evaluating AI capabilities across your CX stack, download our latest AI Agents Buyer’s Guide for practical insight into selecting AI solutions that work in real-world enterprise environments.
