The Pope, a Contact Center Fail, and AI

In calls to customer service, I’ve been hung up on, yelled at, put on hold for what seemed like an eternity, bounced around between agents and departments, been talked down to, and flat-out denied service altogether. Who hasn’t, am I right?

You would expect Pope Leo XIV, the vicar of Christ and spiritual head of the estimated 1.5 billion Roman Catholics around the world, to be able to get whatever he wants. But no, even he is not immune to the frustrations we all experience during some customer service interactions.

According to published reports, not long after being elevated to the papacy in May 2025, Pope Leo called his bank in his native Chicago to change the phone number and address on file to his new Vatican digits. He was subjected to the usual security questions, and then the bank representative informed him that he would need to come to the branch in person to finalize the changes. He explained to her that it might be difficult given his new position in life. She hung up on him, presumably thinking it was a prank. The issue was only resolved when another priest contacted the bank’s president to facilitate the update.

In the current contact center environment, I can’t help but wonder if an artificial intelligent agent would have responded in the same manner to the pope’s request. Would AI have also ended the conversation, or would it have simply processed the request without question?

As AI takes more of a role in basic contact center interactions, it’s highly likely that the next time the pope needs to call his bank, he will be speaking to an AI agent. In an article in this issue’s Insight section (“Service and Support Leaders Expand Human Agent Responsibilities”), research firm Gartner notes that 63 percent of service leaders are reducing frontline headcount gradually through attrition, while reallocating agent capacity toward higher-value responsibilities that support growth, loyalty, and long-term efficiency.

Gartner also expects worldwide spending on AI to total $2.6 trillion this year, a 47 percent increase year over year. A lot of that spending will be on infrastructure, it says, but enterprises, which have yet to flex their spending potential, are expected to expand their use of both the generative AI models embedded in existing software applications and the new AI agents within multiple workflows. Model consumption will increase through multistep processes and integration into broad suites of tools as enterprises recognize the potential value of agentic automation, Gartner predicts.

That might not sit well with the pope, who has been critical of AI. Not long after press time, the pope released a 42,000-word encyclical in which the Vatican emphasized the need for an ethics-based approach to AI technology that prioritizes human dignity and peace. Pope Leo has also created an in-house study group to look at AI because of the acceleration in AI’s use and “its potential effects on human beings and on humanity as a whole,” emphasizing “the church’s concern for the dignity of every human being.”

The pope, no doubt, will speak about AI more broadly and not specifically in a contact center context (although that would make huge headlines for this publication). Nonetheless, it goes without saying that AI in the contact center will march on, with or without the pope’s blessing.

But as to the pope’s concerns about human dignity and AI, they are not without merit. As AI technology in the contact center gains steam, the goal should never be to automate human qualities like judgment, reasoning, or empathy out of the equation, but rather to make sure that those human qualities are available for the moments that truly call for them, and that agents have the necessary AI support tools at their fingertips when those moments arrive.

Leonard Klie is the editor of CRM magazine. He can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.

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