The Impending AI Shift In The Global Call Center Industry
Imagine in the near future, you call a customer service number for a cruise line and are greeted by a highly knowledgeable, smooth-talking artificial intelligence (AI). In a fluid conversation, the AI eloquently explains the service you're interested in, eases your concerns, securely processes your payment and books your reservation. There are no initial wait times, no pauses to look up information, no background noise, just a streamlined interaction.
In a second scenario, a human call center agent greets your call, supported by an AI companion on the line. You describe your preferences, and the AI transcribes them into on-screen notes for the agent. Next, relevant cruise options are found by the AI, each presented to the agent with an AI-generated sales pitch. As the call progresses, the AI provides the agent with real-time sales strategies to help close the sale.
As futuristic as both these scenarios may sound, they are entirely feasible with today's AI technology. Call center experts globally agree that AI will significantly disrupt call center operations for the better, yet opinions vary greatly regarding the pace, scale and exact nature of this transformation. Given this uncertainty amid rapid technological change, I am offering my perspective on how AI could impact the call center landscape from the ground up, helping organizational leaders understand the coming changes and plan effectively.
Industry Impact
The global call center industry was valued at approximately $350 billion in 2024. Projections suggest that the impact of AI on this sector could reach $2 to $3 billion in 2025, which represents about 1% of the total market value. With all the hype around AI, this level of industry impact feels underwhelming.
However, I believe that the advancements in generative AI in 2025 represent a critical turning point, as AI performance now enables two major shifts: first, the replacement of human agents with AI call agents; and second, the enhancement of human agents through AI-driven insights and knowledge. Let me explain how I see both these solutions working.
Shifting Outsourced Call Centers To AI Voice Solutions
AI-powered customer service chat solutions have gained popularity, with many customers from younger generations now preferring them over human agents due to their immediate responses and broad knowledge.
In the last few months, a performance inflection point arrived when leading AI companies Meta, Google and OpenAI released high-performance, multimodal AI voice chat models. Newer models often distinguish themselves by delivering near-instant responses with low latency, demonstrating high intelligence, quickly accessing and interpreting documentation, recognizing basic voice inflection, and supporting multiple languages. I see this recent leap in capability now puts multi-modal AI voice solutions in direct competition with offshore and nearshore call centers.
Interestingly, I estimate the operating cost of a core AI voice model per hour of conversation to be about one-third to one-half the hourly rate of human agents based in places like the Philippines, though this estimate does not include setup and IT oversight fees. Nonetheless, AI compute costs are expected to decrease as new more efficient data centers come online and as AI models become more optimized.
Of course, early implementations of AI voice technology will have limitations and downsides. Initial deployments may lead to callers complaining about slight delays in the AI's responses, known as latency, and expressing surprise when they realize they are interacting with an AI agent instead of a human, as they had expected. Naturally, early AI voice systems will need a fallback to a human agent, which still means there will be some costs associated with human labor.
Enhancing Human Call Agents With AI Capabilities
Recent AI advancements have unlocked powerful features designed to augment, not replace, human agents. I broke these capabilities into four areas: call audio enhancement, just-in-time knowledge delivery, quality control and feedback, and call coaching.
For the first area, background noise can now be suppressed in real time using adaptive audio filters for both the customer and the agent. Additionally, AI can be used to "neutralize" accents, creating a more uniform speaking style, as reported by Mashable. With audio enhancement advances, the focus can shift toward the discussion at hand.
For the second area, I envision a human agent with a real-time AI companion that listens to conversations and offers real-time support via just-in-time knowledge and tips. Here the AI can display the relevant products or support documentation, summarize company policies, suggest appropriate products or services and recommend custom solutions for resolving customer issues or optimizing sales tactics. This alone represents a significant leap in the effectiveness for agents. One downside will be the training required to help agents interact with their AI companions effectively, adding additional ramp-up time for agents.
For the third area, AI can offer post-call deep insights. By listening to the conversation recording, the AI can write summaries, identify remaining tasks, evaluate and grade the human agent's performance, analyze the customer's needs, give insights into product demand and run company policy or compliance checks. These insights will provide agents with a feedback loop to improve their skills, give supervisors a clear view of agent performance and offer operational leaders valuable information about market demand. However, call centers may object to the level of monitoring that AI enables, and some lawmakers are already proposing legislation that could restrict the use of AI in hiring, promotion or termination decisions.
Finally, AI can coach human agents to improve call outcomes. Imagine a human agent receiving a post-call analysis email explaining what specifically they did well and pointing out specific examples of where they could improve, along with training exercises. On-the-job coaching is generally a luxury, but with AI it can become routine.
I anticipate that the transition from offshore and nearshore call centers to AI voice solutions will begin gradually in 2025, and accelerate through 2026 due to required internal testings and buy-ins. In all, the global call center industry is poised for a dramatic shift in the coming years, and the world will be on the line to hear about the results.
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