Customer Service Trends in the Age of AI

Artificial Intelligence is at the core of every contact center trend in 2025. There has never been such rapid evolution of technology as we are experiencing now in a world of foundational Large Language Models and GPT architectures. At the very least, AI is enabling outcomes promised but never delivered by legacy technologies. At its fullest potential, AI is creating an opportunity for contact centers and the broader customer experience ecosystem to be completely reimagined. While some say change will completely disrupt everything we know about contact centers by 2026, we can confidently say the beginnings of those massive changes are already underway in 2025.

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AI: The Driving Force Behind Contact Center Evolution

The most obvious trend is leveraging artificial intelligence to replicate much of what humans do to serve customers today. This is true across all customer-facing channels, whether it be on the website, mobile app, IVR, chats, emails, or voice calls. Companies of all sizes are beginning to experiment with customer-facing AI as the accessibility of the technology increases due to rapid improvements in efficacy and decreasing costs of compute. Companies are quickly deploying LLM-based solutions to create personalized conversational experiences across all modalities. In many cases, these solutions are leveraged to accelerate benefits from technology investments already in the stack while entirely new, standalone use cases emerge as never-before-seen capabilities are discovered. When we look back several years from now, we will recognize 2025 as the year complete transformation began in the contact center.

Harnessing Data to Unlock AI’s Full Potential

The enabler of these LLM-based solutions is high-quality data that is easily accessible to the AI. Companies of all sizes typically sit on massive amounts of data that have not historically been leveraged for anything more than reporting and analytics. To make the most of these large sources of data, companies will need to curate that data to enable AI to truly serve customers with highly effective and efficient outcomes. There are a number of ways that this can be facilitated, from making large investments in Customer Data Platforms (CDP) to partnering with AI-native solutions that bring expertise in data labeling for specific use cases. Whatever approach the company chooses, the key is to first understand the customer journey, build cross-functional teams to plan optimal use case solutions, and proactively curate the data required to create a personalized customer experience that resolves interactions with the lowest level of human effort.

The Emergence of New Contact Center Roles

As AI agents begin to take on more and more use cases as the year progresses, new contact center jobs will emerge. In these early stages, it will be important for humans to provide some degree of oversight and decision-making for the AI. While AI manages the vast majority of customer-facing conversations, humans will be able to observe interactions—not only to maintain the highest quality of AI responses but also to create a feedback loop with employees newly responsible for optimizing automation flows. These new jobs will leverage no or low-code tooling to optimize existing workflows or build new automation processes across a wide range of use cases. Additionally, as the importance of data leveraged by AI rapidly increases, new roles will be created for contact center subject matter experts. The top-performing agents of today know exactly how to frame responses to customers and what information is required to resolve inquiries the first time. This type of expertise will prove valuable in the curation of Knowledge Base content as well as new APIs that enable AI to not only answer questions but also execute important tasks directly within other systems.

Also Read: Making AI a True Partner in Human-Driven Innovation

A Race to the Future: Adopting AI for Competitive Advantage

All of this is for the sole purpose of creating differentiated customer experiences while simultaneously eliminating substantial operating expenses from the business. The winners of this race will be the companies that get started quickly. Those that adopt a “wait and see” approach will inevitably get left behind.

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