AI Investment Grows While Contact Centers Wait for the ROI

Almost all contact center leaders will be maintaining or increasing their investments in artificial intelligence in 2025, according to new research from CCW Digital.

Customers should expect to see more automation this year and in the future, the organization concluded.

Half of those interviewed said they would increase their overall AI investments, while 49 percent said they would be maintaining their level of AI investment this year, the organization found.

“No matter what lens you look at customer contact centers through—whether you’re looking at it from the standpoint of what the customer is looking for; whether you’re looking at the employee culture and employee engagement; or you’re looking at the overall results from the business side of things—the ability to transform with AI is the defining topic,” says Brian Cantor, author of the report and managing director of the Customer Management Practice’s digital division, which includes CCW Digital.

The report also points out that contact center leaders are less than enthused about their ROI to date on AI investments, but they expect returns to increase.

One area in which AI has definitely taken hold is with chatbots and virtual agents. Fifty-seven percent of contact center leaders told CCW that they have more faith in AI’s ability to address customer support issues now than they did a year ago. Additionally, contact center leaders are increasingly embracing chatbots and AI agents as legitimate customer support options.

While AI in the contact center is still in its early stages, CCW Digital’s study found that it has already been extremely beneficial for contact centers. In fact, 76 percent of contact center leaders credit AI for “making it easier for employees to focus on high-value work.” Nearly as many (74 percent) say they are encouraged by AI’s accuracy, uptime, and reliability.

Nonetheless, contact center leaders must continue to assess what the rise of AI-powered self-service will mean for agent overflow, Cantor says.

“The emphasis on self-service alone should theoretically help human employees pivot to more complex work,” he states. “The fact that the platforms themselves are further streamlining the agent experience only creates more optimism about AI’s ability to augment humanity.”

Other report findings include the following:

• Contact centers will seek across-the-board success in 2025, with improving self-service, elevating proactive engagement, and improving agent work ranking as the top AI priorities.
• Although businesses acknowledge some challenges with self-service, they are kinder to their offerings than customers. The majority believe their self-service tools capture meaningful customer data, continuously improve, and understand natural language.
• Slightly less than half of business leaders believe AI-powered self-service should demonstrate humanlike engagement capabilities. A third are less adamant in demanding fully conversational AI but believe self-service should be highly personalized.
• Most contact center leaders don’t think customers should always have instant access to live agents in all channels. Many stress the importance of convenient escalation from AI to human support.
• Contact center leaders think it is important to focus on delivering real resolutions in automated environments, optimizing self-service platforms’ user experiences, and educating customers on the benefits of AI.
• Contact center leaders almost universally subscribe to the “AI for simple issues, agents for complex ones” dichotomy. Eighty-four percent expect agents to spend more time on complex issues this year.
• Most also expect agents to spend more time on knowledge creation, dedicated training, and bot supervision.
• Shifting agents to complex work might, however, be a cause for concern. Currently, only 22 percent of contact center leaders are certain that their teams are ready to excel at next-generation work.
• Key strategies for improving employee adoption of AI include enabling agents to monitor and score bot interactions, better leveraging self-service to improve their workflow, using automation to improve supervisor guidance and performance management, and directly preparing agents for high-value work.

And while AI in general is on the rise, agentic AI is the one technology subsector that is gaining a lot of the attention, according to Cantor. Agentic AI focuses on real-time action and collaboration, not just automating different parts of the communications process. Therefore, it opens the door to more robust self-service experiences while also creating operational efficiencies.

This aspect of AI is relatively new, though. According to the report, only 15 percent of contact center leaders said they are very familiar with the intricacies and value proposition of agentic AI. Nearly half (48 percent) said they were somewhat familiar with this aspect of the technology.

But in the end, while not all leaders grasp the nuances, most believe AI agents will resonate with customers more than chatbots, Cantor concludes.