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Agentic AI is the new blueprint for scalable, high-impact customer service operations. It redefines roles, decision rights, and how work is shared between humans and digital agents. When implemented with purpose and blending autonomous execution with real-time human-AI collaboration, agentic AI helps turn your contact center into a profit-driving, loyalty-building engine.
Over the past year, PwC’s enterprise AI teams have been experimenting with agent-based workflows to learn what agents need to succeed. With Agentforce, Salesforce and PwC are translating our learnings into agent infrastructure, marking a shift from standalone agents to agent platforms, where infrastructure supports reliability, visibility and safe deployment across real business environments. Our recent launch of Agentforce Contact Center represents a joint investment with Salesforce to explore how a truly unified, AI-enabled contact center can transform service from a cost center into a strategic growth engine.
We’ve found that when executed correctly, contact center AI can greatly improve customer and employee experiences, increase productivity and drive revenue growth at your organization. Yet how do you achieve correct execution? Here are some points to consider as you look to transform.
First, as many business leaders know, before beginning any transformation it’s important to understand not just how you’re transforming, but why you’re doing it — and how to prepare for it.
Market context
A contact center is an organization’s front line. It handles anywhere from millions to billions of interactions annually through its combined communication channels, encompassing phone, chat, email, mobile apps, social and in-person connections.
Let’s look at how expanding AI capabilities and rising expectations are colliding to put the contact center, front and center:
- Customers expect instant, contextual and consistent service — anywhere, anytime.
- Employees expect AI-powered tools that remove friction and make their work more rewarding.
- Executives expect tangible ROI on their transformation spending.
- Organizations expect AI to help them power one proactive, unified experience layer across their customer and employee engagement channels.
The opportunity is clear. In many enterprises, up to 40% of inbound contacts could be eliminated or monetized via automation, better self-service and predictive outreach.1
And businesses are eager to gain the advantage. Their spending in the global contact center market is projected to exceed $500B by 2030, with CCaaS and AI augmentations driving double-digit annual growth.2
The results you’re looking for
Unfortunately, spending alone can’t guarantee results. But with many of our leading clients, PwC has seen contact center AI deliver results such as 10-15% NPS (Net Promoter Score) improvement, 30-40% cost reduction, and even 1-2% revenue growth.3
Contact center AI delivers these results by improving measurable value across four levers — speed, scale, consistency and cost efficiency.
Each one is essential to helping unlock productivity and growth in today’s environment. But confirming your organization is implementing them appropriately for top-tier value and impact is even more important.
SPEED: AI in the contact center can accelerate decision-making and execution by automating workflows and offering real-time insights and information.
SCALE: Organizations can extend capabilities across functions, geographical locations and customer segments without linear increases in costs or headcount.
CONSISTENCY: By standardizing processes and outputs, uniform quality and brand alignment can be reached.
COSTS: Automating high-volume tasks and enhancing labor deployment helps AI lower the cost-to-serve across business functions.
A strategic, end-to-end approach can be key
Industry-leading organizations that can increase value from their AI investments aren’t just implementing technology. They’re truly transforming. This means they can:
Reimagine experience by designing journeys that were intended to blend AI and human service — and thereby curating better personalized experiences without losing empathy.
Self-fund their transformation by confirming that the operational effectiveness gained from their agentic investments delivers reinvestment capital.
Redesign operations and rethink how work is managed around new AI capabilities.
At PwC, we believe that transformation should be journey-led, platform-enabled and human-centered. So, we begin our strategic approach by developing vision and success metrics, then designing customer journeys that help us identify your high-value or high-friction points of contact, as well as the business value for addressing them. Once we’ve agreed on key goals, we become invested in achieving them, using value based pricing to create a direct relationship between your outcomes and our fees.
By analyzing your organization’s current processes and determining how they can be rebuilt to incorporate AI, you can avoid common pitfalls that occur when AI is simply layered on top of your workforce.
And just as you can’t successfully automate a journey that isn’t designed correctly, you can’t leverage data that is siloed away from its context. Creating a data fabric — a data management architecture that is unified across channels and service lines — also plays a big role in unlocking more powerful insights into your customers and their intentions, needs and wants.
While reengineering your process to incorporate agentic AI, it’s extremely important to keep in mind that an AI-powered contact center is intended to help reduce reactivity, not interactivity. Always keep humans in the loop so that compassion continues to be a big part of your service, while AI helps simplify and takes care of the basics.
PwC can help you build a scalable foundation for the next generation of AI-led customer service transformation on Salesforce
With Agentforce Contact Center, launched in March 2026, PwC and Salesforce have jointly invested in a fully native CCaaS platform, unifying voice, digital channels, routing, AI, and CRM data in a single system and demonstrating how a unified, AI-enabled contact center can transform service from a cost center to a growth engine. Through early access to new capabilities and hands-on implementation with clients, we help organizations move from interaction handling to outcome driven customer resolution – consisting of better resolution, stronger loyalty and measurable growth. This includes:
- Autonomous AI agents as trusted service specialists that understand customer intent and carry context across channels—resolving issues independently while actively assisting human agents through contextual escalation when needed
- Human agents that are elevated to more complex, creative tasks and enabled by data and AI insights rather than replaced
- The future of human-like phone interactions as intent-based, informed conversations
What can the shift from an integrated to a unified platform deliver for service leaders? As AI integration moves from a nice-to-have to a must-have for contact centers, it’s changing our approach to the contact center systemically. Agentic AI is rapidly shifting from a layer that is enabled within a contact center to an integral part of a contact center’s foundation. Taking full advantage of AI in this context means we must think not just about how to use it, but about the environment we are using it in must adapt to it.
The shift to a unified platform unlocks what fragmented architectures fundamentally cannot: the ability to let AI operate at its full potential. When AI is embedded in the foundation of a contact center — rather than layered on top of disconnected systems — it can act on complete data, eliminate context loss, and scale without the drag of maintaining parallel architectures. For service leaders, this is the real opportunity: not just adopting AI, but building the environment where it can deliver transformational results and not have to constantly maintain integrations.
Common challenges that service leaders encounter as they rise to this challenge generally fall into one of three main categories: fragmented applications, AI as an afterthought, and channel inconsistency. Leaders can help solve for these by creating a unified architecture, refining and updating legacy processes, and creating consistency across channels.
Create a unified architecture
When voice and CRM channels are not connected, fragmented applications create complex architectures for each area, driving maintenance costs and limiting the ability to scale. Avoid this by using AI to help unify your applications and architecture.
Refine and update your processes to support AI
Instead of layering AI onto siloed data and legacy processes, embed it in the foundation of your new platform. Treating AI as an afterthought can reduce its effectiveness. Disrupting and improving your processes to support AI now can help set you up for success in the future.
Use AI to create and strengthen consistency across channels
Channel inconsistency can have a very negative impact on customer experience. Instead of separating human-led and digital-led services into parallel channels, create a single line of service that adapts to customer needs and preferences by integrating human and digital agents.
Unifying the contact center into a single, AI-enabled platform can resolve challenges and create transformational impact in several key areas:
Voice and telephony New CCaaS capabilities in Salesforce’s Agentforce Contact Center mean organizations now have the option to rethink their telephony strategy and potentially allow for new singular or evolved hybrid models that maximize concurrent actions and channel handoffs.
CRM and data systems can streamline their operations and data strategy by making Salesforce the active system of record for full customer interactions, across all channels, instead of the downstream recipient of interaction data.
AI layers can transform from a conglomeration of bolted-on bots and third-party tools into a single platform in which AI operates from within, based on core CRM data, without loss of context and without requiring a sync step.
Routing and handoff at most organizations are split across CCaaS and CRM platforms, but with unification, these can be consolidated into a single layer, reducing governance complexity and allowing for more seamless multi-channel experiences.
And finally, where supervision and analytics currently require multiple dashboards across platforms, unification can provide a single view of AI and human agent performance.
Creating value for customers, employees and stakeholders through intelligent service transformation
To create value for customers, we work to enhance customer-centric support, moving from reactive support to intelligent resolution. To achieve this, all issues are identified, routed and resolved through a clear understanding of customer intent. Human agents engage whenever judgment, empathy or escalation is needed, stepping in immediately, informed with the detailed context, and empowered to solve problems. Once this is achieved, the measurement of good service shifts from case volumes to value outcomes.
To create value for employees, we use agentic efficiency to unlock opportunities, turning operational challenges into measurable outcomes. Autonomy and assistive support can help create a lower cost-to-serve and deliver faster, more consistent outcomes. This leads to higher productivity, reduced attrition, and the ability to scale capacity without growing headcount in a linear way. The result is improved trust as well as better customer satisfaction.
Creating value for stakeholders means having clear impact across the organization. Implementing Agentforce through PwC’s intelligent service transformation can deliver the following:
- For customers: Faster resolution, fewer handoffs, higher confidence.
- For human agents: Less repetitive work, more meaningful engagement.
- For service leaders: Predictable performance, scalable operations and an integrated platform.
- For executives: Measurable ROI and an AI-ready service model.
Key outcomes4 can include:
40-60% AI containment on voice (the percentage of calls resolved without transferring to a human)
6,000 hours of data entry time reclaimed annually at one 30-person organization
Multi-day time savings on phone number setup. What was previously a process that took several days can now be completed in just a few minutes.
Unlocking our intelligent service transformation on Salesforce
To deliver a business-led, AI-native transformation of the contact center, we adopt a modular approach to tailor solutions that help increase value for your organization by focusing on the specific opportunities where transformation can have the greatest impact.
Vision Sprint: Ignite the AI journey
In a half-day ideation session, we help you kickstart inspiration, vision and alignment through immersive demos, stakeholder collaboration and use case exploration.
Business Case and Strategy: Turn vision into value
Next, PwC will host a 3-day workshop to help you develop a tailored business case, align on strategic priorities and set the stage for execution.
Execution Plan: Scale with impact
PwC specialists will lead a 6-8 week project to translate vision into action with a strategic roadmap, execution plan and executive alignment support.
Reimagined Contact Center Implementation
PwC will help deliver an agentic contact center designed to support human talent with agentic voice integrated capabilities to reimagine customer service at scale.
Whether you approach it one module at a time or all at once, the full-stack, AI-native contact center transformation that PwC offers on Salesforce can deliver the revenue growth, cost effectiveness and improved employee and customer experience you desire.
1Source: – Adapted from McKinsey & Company (2021) and Forrester Research (2023).
2Source: Grand View Research, 2023. Contact Center Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report, 2023–2030. Available at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/contact-center-market [Accessed 27 June 2024].
3Source: Gartner, Inc. 2024. Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure. Gartner Research. Retrieved June 10, 2024, from Gartner database.
4Based on PwC client engagements.
Take the first step on your AI journey
AI is transformational. A simple tweak may not be enough to prepare your organization for taking full advantage of it. A half-day workshop with PwC can help you start to rethink and reimagine your business strategy in the age of agentic AI.
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