According to CallMiner’s 2024 CX Landscape Report, 62% of organisations have at least partially implemented AI technologies, with only 24% remaining in the early stages of AI implementation. All the while, early fears around AI implementation are lessening. CX and contact centre decision-makers are increasingly confident in their ability to manage AI.
This year we’ll see organisations scaling and implementing emerging AI technologies in a disciplined way. Organisations will get more savvy about leveraging AI and automation for practical and targeted use cases vs. generalised AI and CX technologies with sweeping promises that fail to deliver measurable value.
Here are some of our top predictions that will help organisations empower frontline contact centre employees and supercharge CX this year and beyond.
- Agentic AI gets personal: This year will mark a turning point for conversation intelligence and agentic AI — highly personalised AI capable of taking autonomous actions. With the progress expected in the coming year, we anticipate that by 2027, hyper-personalised virtual agents will seamlessly integrate with individual data to predict user needs in ways we haven’t seen before. This evolution will eliminate routine administrative tasks, allowing frontline employees to focus more on strategic and creative pursuits, fundamentally changing how contact centres work and engage with technology.
- AI councils become both a blessing and a curse: AI adoption is already transforming CX teams, yet many implementations fall short of delivering the expected value. CX Landscape Report data shows that 37% of contact centre and CX leaders struggle to choose the right AI solutions, and 27% lack clarity on how to measure AI’s ROI. In response, organisations are forming AI councils or appointing chief AI officers to oversee AI procurement, implementation, and adoption across the enterprise. This trend is likely to accelerate in 2025. On the positive side, well-informed decisions can ensure AI investments drive value — improving CX, boosting efficiency, or supporting contact centre agents. However, involving too many decision-makers risks creating bottlenecks that slow down procurement and hold back progress. To stay competitive, organisations must strike a balance between adopting AI responsibly and maintaining the agility needed to keep pace with rapid advancements.
- Surveys get smarter: While a critical component of a holistic voice of the customer (VoC) strategy, surveys have seen little innovation – with organisations experiencing diminishing value from legacy survey programs. In 2025, surveys are going to get a lot smarter and strategic. Many teams already rely on conversation intelligence to get a better sense of their unsolicited customer feedback (e.g. customer interactions that happen in the contact centre, on social media, in unsolicited reviews, and more). Pairing that information with solicited feedback is critical, as it provides a more complete picture of the customer journey and VoC. Taking some lessons from unsolicited feedback, AI will help organisations develop more intelligent and targeted surveys — improving the quality of solicited insights.
- Domain-specific AI gains traction in the contact centre: When generalised models for generative AI became mainstream with the introduction of ChatGPT and other tools, many imagined their transformative applications for CX. In reality, many organisations find it a more pragmatic approach to blend generative AI with domain-specific models and practical workflows designed for the contact centre. We predict the trend of specific and practical applications to continue further into this year, as organisations strive to drive value and gain more return on their AI investments. In other words, proven and purpose-built are the key words when it comes to evaluating AI for the contact centre and CX purposes.
- Contact centres turn to AI and automation to cover the basics: While everyone likes to think about the future of AI, some of the most transformative applications have to do with how AI and automation can improve basic processes. For example, more organisations will look to AI to automate quality assurance (QA), helping the QA analyst’s remit expand from reviewing a fraction of an agent’s calls to 100% of customer interactions. AI will analyse these interactions at scale, helping contact centres improve their quality and compliance, as well as focus QA time on the interactions that require it. Within heavily regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, AI can help ensure that agents stick to the best practices that mitigate risk, avoid penalties, and serve vulnerable customers with empathy.
Download the CallMiner CX Landscape Report to learn more.