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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 those 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.
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 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. 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’s approach is tailored to fit your organization’s needs
To deliver a business-led, AI-native transformation of the contact center, PwC helps seamlessly combine journey design, operating model and operations redesign, technology modernization and human enablement. We adopt a modular approach to tailor AI-driven solutions that help increase value for your organization by focusing on the specific opportunities where transformation can have the greatest impact.
Each component can be tailored to your maturity and platform landscape, driving scalable AI transformation and flexing so you can meet your technology stack and transformation goals — ideally enabling a self-funding roadmap that creates lasting impact at your organization.
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.
Turn vision into value: Next, we conduct a 3-day workshop to help you develop a tailored business case, align on strategic priorities and set the stage for execution.
Execution planning: To help you translate vision into action, we typically spend 4-6 weeks working with you to create a strong roadmap for delivering scale with impact and help you achieve executive alignment support.
Whether you approach it one module at a time or all at once, the full-stack, AI-native contact center transformation that PwC offers can deliver the revenue growth, cost effectiveness and improved employee and customer experience you desire.
1. Adapted from McKinsey & Company (2021) and Forrester Research (2023)
2. Grand View Research, 2023. Contact Center Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report, 2023–2030. [Accessed 27 June 2024].
3. Gartner, Inc. 2024. Magic Quadrant for Contact Center Infrastructure. Gartner Research. Retrieved June 10, 2024, from Gartner database.
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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