theCUBE Research hosts Bob Laliberte of theCUBE Research and Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research as they examine how artificial intelligence, AI, moves from pilot to production in contact centers. Kerravala and Laliberte bring deep contact center expertise and discuss the shift from assistants to autonomous agents, vendor strategies from Cisco, Talkdesk, Zoom and Five9 and the operational capabilities required to deliver consistent and scalable customer experience, CX improvements. The conversation emphasizes practical approaches to measurable CX value and the governance, data quality and change management needed for production deployments.
Key takeaways include prioritizing issue resolution over automation and measuring impact with metrics such as cost per interaction and Net Promoter Score, NPS. Kerravala states that enterprise-grade AI agents must operate within governance, escalation and explainability frameworks; they emphasize clear policies and oversight to maintain trust and compliance. Laliberte highlights that success depends on high data quality, change management and executive sponsorship to move solutions from experimentation into repeatable and trustworthy production deployments; they underscore operational readiness and rigorous performance measurement as critical factors.
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Introduction with Bob Laliberte & Zeus Kerravala
theCUBE Research hosts Bob Laliberte of theCUBE Research and Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research as they examine how artificial intelligence, AI, moves from pilot to production in contact centers. Kerravala and Laliberte bring deep contact center expertise and discuss the shift from assistants to autonomous agents, vendor strategies from Cisco, Talkdesk, Zoom and Five9 and the operational capabilities required to deliver consistent and scalable customer experience, CX improvements. The conversation emphasizes practical approaches to measurable CX value and the governance, data quality and change management needed for production deployments.
Key takeaways include prioritizing issue resolution over automation and measuring impact with metrics such as cost per interaction and Net Promoter Score, NPS. Kerravala states that enterprise-grade AI agents must operate within governance, escalation and explainability frameworks; they emphasize clear policies and oversight to maintain trust and compliance. Laliberte highlights that success depends on high data quality, change management and executive sponsorship to move solutions from experimentation into repeatable and trustworthy production deployments; they underscore operational readiness and rigorous performance measurement as critical factors.
>> Hello and welcome to the CX Summit. I'm Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research, and I'm joined by my good friend and co-host, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. Over the course of this summit, we're going to look beyond the broad promises surrounding artificial intelligence and focus on a much more practical question And that is, where is AI creating measurable value in customer experience, more specifically contact centers today? And what does it take to achieve that value consistently, responsibly, and at scale? Welcome, Zeus.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Hey, Bob. Yeah, this is a great topic, I think. Obviously, you and I go to a lot of events, and the one theme we hear at every event is how AI is moving from pilot to production. And I think now that we're moving out of the experimentation phase, nowhere is that more true than in the contact center. And it's been interesting to watch the evolution of the space what we call a contact center. Really, the industry has been shifting more to a CX type of narrative, right? And I think, in fact, it doesn't really matter Who I talk to now, contact center managers, C-level, they're all trying to understand how they can evolve, bring AI into the contact center, but with the goal of creating a differentiated customer experience. And I think any of us that's called your favorite brand knows what a bad experience is like. And we certainly want those good experiences by now. And so let's hope AI can bring that.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. And I think, investigating this from a contact center perspective is really good because the environments are really demanding and they're also measurable, right? So contact centers have large volumes of interactions. There's significant labor costs and direct moments of truth with customers. You know, when something works, as you mentioned, right, organizations can see improvements in resolution, productivity, customer satisfaction, things like that. When something fails, The consequences are also pretty highly visible, and a poor AI interaction can increase customer effort, right? Damage trust and ultimately hurt the brand.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, well, we've seen this play out before, right? We had chatbots before, we had IVRs, and it was supposed to offload a lot of the labor and also allow users to self-service. But you know as well as I do that if those experiences are so bad that the first thing we often do is just zero out to an agent, or we scream at the phone, "agent". And you're right, it often adds to the workload of the customer, not takes away from it. And so I do think we need to be, very careful here in, in making sure that the things we do with the contact center and by bringing the AI in actually has a tangible impact on lowering customer effort. And I think that's something, I'm not gonna say the industry forgets about, but with an effort to cut labor, I think sometimes that isn't as prominent as it should be.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And I thinkultimately the goal for a lot of these organizations has to be aboutresolution. And not so much just the effort that's made, but the fact that there's a positive outcome, right? A great customer experience and not justautomation for the sake of having automation.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, yeah. And I think as we go through the summit, I urge people to really think beyond your traditional experiences, right? I think one of the interesting things for this whole industry is how do you measure success Historically, we've measured success in the context of things like average handle time, first call resolution. And those metrics don't, I don't think, matter as much anymore. I think you want to be able to get into, are you lowering the cost per interaction? What you see is your NPS score going up? Are your employees more productive? And as you think about it, we've had such a focus on average handle time in this industry, but is that shorter call actually a good thing if the issue remains largely unsolved, right? And is higher containment, you know, good if trust declines? And I think we've struggled with these things in this industry for a long time. But we've had these tried and true metrics that we've lived by. But I just think where we're at today, and what I'm hoping that we get out of this is an understanding of where the contact centers go and how it impacts CX, but more importantly, how we measure success in the future, because I think that'll help a lot of the brands that use it to determine the evolution of where they take this technology.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, I know. I definitely— I couldn't agree more with you on that. it's— the technology is evolving so rapidly. And like you said, a lot of times how you're measuring and what the metrics are that you use to measure the success are changing rapidly. And organizations need to become more familiar with what those are and understand what they are so that they can respond and be able to provide that to their management team as well. And that's one of the reasons why we're doing this summit is to be able to help organizations understand, what are the different things that are changing and what are the different metrics and how are they able to report on those and raise them up.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, I think one of the big changes obviously is this shift from assistants to agents. And we've had assistants for a while. they do a good job of helping, maybe informing the contact center agent of next best action, things like that. I think bots are very good at answering very narrow questions. In fact, I think if you put all the interactions that come into a brand on a 2x2 grid and think of simplicity on one scale and frequency of interaction on another, things that are high frequency, low complexity, perfect for a bot answer, right? But we do have the rest of the interactions that tend to be a little more complex. And while Copilot's doing a good job of assisting employees today, I think where AI agents are going, especially the long horizon agents and things, they can, they remember information, they can reason across steps, they can use multiple tools, and they really become an autonomous digital agent that actually has a memory, understands what the customer wants, can detect different nuances in tone and, you know, in language and things like that, and can complete those workflows. But Bob, it does raise the stakes around the requirements for testing governance, escalation, and obviously data quality. There's— in fact, we were at an event earlier this year where one of the CIOs on stage, we— I asked him about data, and remember his response? He said, data management is all I think about all day, every day, right? And so that's going to be part of this.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, no, I think you're spot on there. Again, the goal should be about resolution, not just automation for its own sake. And I think, like you said, the agents are stepping up. They're able to handle a lot more complicated issues than just the bots can. So really helping to drive greater customer experiences. But I think the key is that they're able to preserve that context across the different channels and be able to make the handoff to a human agent when more is needed, right? Especially if there's some sort of empathy or human judgment that's required to make that choice. And so there's still going to be this combination of the technology along with the human component of it in these organizations. And the key is to have it move, you know, work as seamlessly as possible between the two. So, and honestly, that's what we wanted to talk about here, right? So we've got a bunch of different sessions that we wanted to bring in. A lot of vendors that are coming in to talk about their solutions, how they're helping to improve customer experience at their customers and so forth. So one of the ones we have coming on is Cisco, and they've got their 4-pillar strategy: context-driven orchestration management, hybrid human AI workforce, and the security and governance required for mission-critical CX. So looking forward to hearing more about what they have to say. And then maybe you want to talk about Talkdesk, Zeus.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah. And I like Cisco because I've always said when it comes to Cisco, nobody does big better than Cisco. Right. And they have a lot of large enterprises and security and governance and data sovereignty is a core foundation of those. So it'll be good to hear from them. Now, with Talkdesk, Talkdesk has probably been the vendor that is the most aggressive in trying to pivot away from traditional CCaaS. In fact, at the analyst event, Tiago Paiva, the CEO, came out and said, CCaaS is dead. It's all about customer experience automation. And while he was being a little bit tongue-in-cheek because the product's still built around CCaaS, what he was talking about was he wants to sell, deliver multi-agent systems that work cross-department, with the workflows. They're very specialized in certain verticals, healthcare, retail. Things like that. But to be able to deliver proactive customer engagement that I really applaud Tiago as a minority shareholder, he had to do something disruptive, right? And I do like this pivot to CXA. And so, I'm looking forward to that one. Bob, we've got another disruptor. Zoom's a relative newcomer too. Talk to us. What do you preview for that session?
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, I think Zoom and actually it's a great session 'cause we not only have Zoom, but we also have their partner coming on as well. So Converged Technology Professionals. So we're really going to get, I think, a firsthand view of how Zoom's technology and how Converged Technology Professionals are able to accelerate the time to value for organizations, right? Being able to select the first use case, being able to talk about, How do you connect all that fragmented data that may exist in your environment that you need to pull together to get to resolution, right? And then how do you get that into production, right? We talked about some of the metrics. So they're going to also talk about how they're helping to establish metrics and continuously test in basically increasingly capable agents. So along what we were talking about with Talkdesk and being able to have that multi-agent systems and doing more, I think we're going to see and hear from Zoom a lot more about that as well with what they're doing with their agents.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, and I love the fact that we have a partner on because these are the companies that are actually in the field working with the customer, making these things real. In fact, in the preview, I know it was funny when we were prepping because Joe Rittenhouse and the partner talked about sometimes the customer wants to move too fast. And while the vendor community would like everyone to move, you know, at lightning, at AI speed, you know, customers aren't ready for that. And so that's good to see. And lastly, we have Five9, and Five9 is, of all the vendors in here, they are the most established, long history in CCaaS. They were really one of the pioneers in the switch from on-prem contact center to cloud. And they were really early into AI too. So I think with Five9, what I'm looking for is, what we'll hear about is how AI's producing early value, how enterprises, can start with AI and certain parts of the contact center, get some value, move from assistants to agents. Uh, they've been good at coming out with things like implementation playbooks and helping their customers reveal the time to value in a way that can be measured and then bring success to the whole organization. And so I think, that's a, between Talkdesk, Cisco, Zoom, and Five9, I think that's a great mix of companies for this summit. So yeah.
Bob Laliberte
>> So I was just thinking, yeah, we've got a great lineup and I think it's gonna provide a lot of value for the practitioners who are watching. To be able to understand, and also the executive team as well that's there to be able to understand how this is getting put in place, what metrics they should look at, and what value they should be expecting and when.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, well, and while each of these vendors are different and bring a different view, there are some consistent themes that we'll see summit wide. First one is I think, what really separates an enterprise-grade AI agent from a chatbot. We are going through this transition. And, I think, like I said, chatbots have done a great job until now helping assist agents. But what we want now is for the ability to act autonomously across systems, but also operate within policies and within the guardrails, and then be able to explain or trace its behavior. And then if something does go wrong, escalate appropriately.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. And one of the other big questions we want to address is, you know, what does it take to move from pilot into production, right? That's been a big thing with AI, right? What's the time to trust? How are organizations putting this into production? How are they scaling that as well? So I think organizations should be listening for some practical answers on the importance of data quality, high data quality, the integrations that need to be done. Being open to redesigning their process, right? The workflows and so forth. There's, I think, some issues around knowledge management that need to be addressed as well. And then obviously one of the most important things is probably change management, right? Understanding that when you're putting these in, you bring these new technologies, right? That resistance to change is more of a cultural issue, right? Than it is a technology one. But that's something that organizations need to get over in order to take that next step and get that next level of value. And then ultimately, I think when you're thinking about this shift, it's the need to have that executive sponsorship and executive ownership to help drive this.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah. And I guess the other thing that we should look for here, and this is really going to be fascinating, not just in contact center and in CX, but really across every industry that we cover, Bob, and that's how people and AI work together. Now, in contact center, it's very important that they work together seamlessly because the implications are bad customer experience or great customer experience, right? But I do think that while a lot of the media hype tends to over-rotate around the virtual agents, the future isn't virtual only. We're gonna have people and those people are gonna play an even more important role So AI handles routine work, people will have to handle the more complex interactions. And when you think about the implications of that, now that person has to have the right coaching, the right information, right? The workforce plans to make sure they're staffed up. And so, if an interaction does go to a person, that person becomes more important than ever. And we need to make sure that the virtual agents and the people agents can work together seamlessly and deliver a great experience. Otherwise, we're gonna have what we had in the past, which is a lot of new technology and a lot of frustrated customers. And obviously with the investments being made, nobody wants that.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, and I would like to invite everyone to make sure that when you're watching these sessions, absolutely compare the different strategies that these organizations have to deliver value, but really focus on some of the transferable lessons that you'll see and things like, how do you start with a customer or business problem? How are you defining success in advance, right? How are you preserving customer choice? And then, we talked a lot about agents and multi-agents and so forth. It's also going to be important for organizations to think about how they're designing in governance before they're granting that autonomy. So make sure you're listening for those as we go through these sessions.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, and it's important to understand that the brands that lead will not be the ones that simply automate the most, right? They will be those that turn AI into a better, more consistent set of outcomes, but will also be able to earn employee and customer trust. And I think sometimes we over-rotate on customer trust. Employee trust is just as important because if employees don't feel the system's working on their behalf, they're going to be unlikely to use it too. But it's not just about automation, right? This is about creating seamlessness of experience across the employee and customer interaction spectrum.
Bob Laliberte
>> Absolutely. especially on that employee side, that time to get comfortable with the technology is going to be so critical. Yeah. You're
Bob Laliberte
>> building—don't bring around your employees everywhere.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Hey, so thank you all for watching this, and I want you to sit back, relax, and watch the sessions we have coming up. And Zeus and I will return after all those sessions to connect the themes and share some practical takeaways for you.
>> Hello and welcome to the CX Summit. I'm Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst at theCUBE Research, and I'm joined by my good friend and co-host, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. Over the course of this summit, we're going to look beyond the broad promises surrounding artificial intelligence and focus on a much more practical question And that is, where is AI creating measurable value in customer experience, more specifically contact centers today? And what does it take to achieve that value consistently, responsibly, and at scale? Welcome, Zeus.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Hey, Bob. Yeah, this is a great topic, I think. Obviously, you and I go to a lot of events, and the one theme we hear at every event is how AI is moving from pilot to production. And I think now that we're moving out of the experimentation phase, nowhere is that more true than in the contact center. And it's been interesting to watch the evolution of the space what we call a contact center. Really, the industry has been shifting more to a CX type of narrative, right? And I think, in fact, it doesn't really matter Who I talk to now, contact center managers, C-level, they're all trying to understand how they can evolve, bring AI into the contact center, but with the goal of creating a differentiated customer experience. And I think any of us that's called your favorite brand knows what a bad experience is like. And we certainly want those good experiences by now. And so let's hope AI can bring that.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. And I think, investigating this from a contact center perspective is really good because the environments are really demanding and they're also measurable, right? So contact centers have large volumes of interactions. There's significant labor costs and direct moments of truth with customers. You know, when something works, as you mentioned, right, organizations can see improvements in resolution, productivity, customer satisfaction, things like that. When something fails, The consequences are also pretty highly visible, and a poor AI interaction can increase customer effort, right? Damage trust and ultimately hurt the brand.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, well, we've seen this play out before, right? We had chatbots before, we had IVRs, and it was supposed to offload a lot of the labor and also allow users to self-service. But you know as well as I do that if those experiences are so bad that the first thing we often do is just zero out to an agent, or we scream at the phone, "agent". And you're right, it often adds to the workload of the customer, not takes away from it. And so I do think we need to be, very careful here in, in making sure that the things we do with the contact center and by bringing the AI in actually has a tangible impact on lowering customer effort. And I think that's something, I'm not gonna say the industry forgets about, but with an effort to cut labor, I think sometimes that isn't as prominent as it should be.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And I thinkultimately the goal for a lot of these organizations has to be aboutresolution. And not so much just the effort that's made, but the fact that there's a positive outcome, right? A great customer experience and not justautomation for the sake of having automation.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, yeah. And I think as we go through the summit, I urge people to really think beyond your traditional experiences, right? I think one of the interesting things for this whole industry is how do you measure success Historically, we've measured success in the context of things like average handle time, first call resolution. And those metrics don't, I don't think, matter as much anymore. I think you want to be able to get into, are you lowering the cost per interaction? What you see is your NPS score going up? Are your employees more productive? And as you think about it, we've had such a focus on average handle time in this industry, but is that shorter call actually a good thing if the issue remains largely unsolved, right? And is higher containment, you know, good if trust declines? And I think we've struggled with these things in this industry for a long time. But we've had these tried and true metrics that we've lived by. But I just think where we're at today, and what I'm hoping that we get out of this is an understanding of where the contact centers go and how it impacts CX, but more importantly, how we measure success in the future, because I think that'll help a lot of the brands that use it to determine the evolution of where they take this technology.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, I know. I definitely— I couldn't agree more with you on that. it's— the technology is evolving so rapidly. And like you said, a lot of times how you're measuring and what the metrics are that you use to measure the success are changing rapidly. And organizations need to become more familiar with what those are and understand what they are so that they can respond and be able to provide that to their management team as well. And that's one of the reasons why we're doing this summit is to be able to help organizations understand, what are the different things that are changing and what are the different metrics and how are they able to report on those and raise them up.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, I think one of the big changes obviously is this shift from assistants to agents. And we've had assistants for a while. they do a good job of helping, maybe informing the contact center agent of next best action, things like that. I think bots are very good at answering very narrow questions. In fact, I think if you put all the interactions that come into a brand on a 2x2 grid and think of simplicity on one scale and frequency of interaction on another, things that are high frequency, low complexity, perfect for a bot answer, right? But we do have the rest of the interactions that tend to be a little more complex. And while Copilot's doing a good job of assisting employees today, I think where AI agents are going, especially the long horizon agents and things, they can, they remember information, they can reason across steps, they can use multiple tools, and they really become an autonomous digital agent that actually has a memory, understands what the customer wants, can detect different nuances in tone and, you know, in language and things like that, and can complete those workflows. But Bob, it does raise the stakes around the requirements for testing governance, escalation, and obviously data quality. There's— in fact, we were at an event earlier this year where one of the CIOs on stage, we— I asked him about data, and remember his response? He said, data management is all I think about all day, every day, right? And so that's going to be part of this.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, no, I think you're spot on there. Again, the goal should be about resolution, not just automation for its own sake. And I think, like you said, the agents are stepping up. They're able to handle a lot more complicated issues than just the bots can. So really helping to drive greater customer experiences. But I think the key is that they're able to preserve that context across the different channels and be able to make the handoff to a human agent when more is needed, right? Especially if there's some sort of empathy or human judgment that's required to make that choice. And so there's still going to be this combination of the technology along with the human component of it in these organizations. And the key is to have it move, you know, work as seamlessly as possible between the two. So, and honestly, that's what we wanted to talk about here, right? So we've got a bunch of different sessions that we wanted to bring in. A lot of vendors that are coming in to talk about their solutions, how they're helping to improve customer experience at their customers and so forth. So one of the ones we have coming on is Cisco, and they've got their 4-pillar strategy: context-driven orchestration management, hybrid human AI workforce, and the security and governance required for mission-critical CX. So looking forward to hearing more about what they have to say. And then maybe you want to talk about Talkdesk, Zeus.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah. And I like Cisco because I've always said when it comes to Cisco, nobody does big better than Cisco. Right. And they have a lot of large enterprises and security and governance and data sovereignty is a core foundation of those. So it'll be good to hear from them. Now, with Talkdesk, Talkdesk has probably been the vendor that is the most aggressive in trying to pivot away from traditional CCaaS. In fact, at the analyst event, Tiago Paiva, the CEO, came out and said, CCaaS is dead. It's all about customer experience automation. And while he was being a little bit tongue-in-cheek because the product's still built around CCaaS, what he was talking about was he wants to sell, deliver multi-agent systems that work cross-department, with the workflows. They're very specialized in certain verticals, healthcare, retail. Things like that. But to be able to deliver proactive customer engagement that I really applaud Tiago as a minority shareholder, he had to do something disruptive, right? And I do like this pivot to CXA. And so, I'm looking forward to that one. Bob, we've got another disruptor. Zoom's a relative newcomer too. Talk to us. What do you preview for that session?
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, I think Zoom and actually it's a great session 'cause we not only have Zoom, but we also have their partner coming on as well. So Converged Technology Professionals. So we're really going to get, I think, a firsthand view of how Zoom's technology and how Converged Technology Professionals are able to accelerate the time to value for organizations, right? Being able to select the first use case, being able to talk about, How do you connect all that fragmented data that may exist in your environment that you need to pull together to get to resolution, right? And then how do you get that into production, right? We talked about some of the metrics. So they're going to also talk about how they're helping to establish metrics and continuously test in basically increasingly capable agents. So along what we were talking about with Talkdesk and being able to have that multi-agent systems and doing more, I think we're going to see and hear from Zoom a lot more about that as well with what they're doing with their agents.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, and I love the fact that we have a partner on because these are the companies that are actually in the field working with the customer, making these things real. In fact, in the preview, I know it was funny when we were prepping because Joe Rittenhouse and the partner talked about sometimes the customer wants to move too fast. And while the vendor community would like everyone to move, you know, at lightning, at AI speed, you know, customers aren't ready for that. And so that's good to see. And lastly, we have Five9, and Five9 is, of all the vendors in here, they are the most established, long history in CCaaS. They were really one of the pioneers in the switch from on-prem contact center to cloud. And they were really early into AI too. So I think with Five9, what I'm looking for is, what we'll hear about is how AI's producing early value, how enterprises, can start with AI and certain parts of the contact center, get some value, move from assistants to agents. Uh, they've been good at coming out with things like implementation playbooks and helping their customers reveal the time to value in a way that can be measured and then bring success to the whole organization. And so I think, that's a, between Talkdesk, Cisco, Zoom, and Five9, I think that's a great mix of companies for this summit. So yeah.
Bob Laliberte
>> So I was just thinking, yeah, we've got a great lineup and I think it's gonna provide a lot of value for the practitioners who are watching. To be able to understand, and also the executive team as well that's there to be able to understand how this is getting put in place, what metrics they should look at, and what value they should be expecting and when.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, well, and while each of these vendors are different and bring a different view, there are some consistent themes that we'll see summit wide. First one is I think, what really separates an enterprise-grade AI agent from a chatbot. We are going through this transition. And, I think, like I said, chatbots have done a great job until now helping assist agents. But what we want now is for the ability to act autonomously across systems, but also operate within policies and within the guardrails, and then be able to explain or trace its behavior. And then if something does go wrong, escalate appropriately.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. And one of the other big questions we want to address is, you know, what does it take to move from pilot into production, right? That's been a big thing with AI, right? What's the time to trust? How are organizations putting this into production? How are they scaling that as well? So I think organizations should be listening for some practical answers on the importance of data quality, high data quality, the integrations that need to be done. Being open to redesigning their process, right? The workflows and so forth. There's, I think, some issues around knowledge management that need to be addressed as well. And then obviously one of the most important things is probably change management, right? Understanding that when you're putting these in, you bring these new technologies, right? That resistance to change is more of a cultural issue, right? Than it is a technology one. But that's something that organizations need to get over in order to take that next step and get that next level of value. And then ultimately, I think when you're thinking about this shift, it's the need to have that executive sponsorship and executive ownership to help drive this.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah. And I guess the other thing that we should look for here, and this is really going to be fascinating, not just in contact center and in CX, but really across every industry that we cover, Bob, and that's how people and AI work together. Now, in contact center, it's very important that they work together seamlessly because the implications are bad customer experience or great customer experience, right? But I do think that while a lot of the media hype tends to over-rotate around the virtual agents, the future isn't virtual only. We're gonna have people and those people are gonna play an even more important role So AI handles routine work, people will have to handle the more complex interactions. And when you think about the implications of that, now that person has to have the right coaching, the right information, right? The workforce plans to make sure they're staffed up. And so, if an interaction does go to a person, that person becomes more important than ever. And we need to make sure that the virtual agents and the people agents can work together seamlessly and deliver a great experience. Otherwise, we're gonna have what we had in the past, which is a lot of new technology and a lot of frustrated customers. And obviously with the investments being made, nobody wants that.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, and I would like to invite everyone to make sure that when you're watching these sessions, absolutely compare the different strategies that these organizations have to deliver value, but really focus on some of the transferable lessons that you'll see and things like, how do you start with a customer or business problem? How are you defining success in advance, right? How are you preserving customer choice? And then, we talked a lot about agents and multi-agents and so forth. It's also going to be important for organizations to think about how they're designing in governance before they're granting that autonomy. So make sure you're listening for those as we go through these sessions.
Zeus Kerravala
>> Yeah, and it's important to understand that the brands that lead will not be the ones that simply automate the most, right? They will be those that turn AI into a better, more consistent set of outcomes, but will also be able to earn employee and customer trust. And I think sometimes we over-rotate on customer trust. Employee trust is just as important because if employees don't feel the system's working on their behalf, they're going to be unlikely to use it too. But it's not just about automation, right? This is about creating seamlessness of experience across the employee and customer interaction spectrum.
Bob Laliberte
>> Absolutely. especially on that employee side, that time to get comfortable with the technology is going to be so critical. Yeah. You're
Bob Laliberte
>> building—don't bring around your employees everywhere.
Bob Laliberte
>> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Hey, so thank you all for watching this, and I want you to sit back, relax, and watch the sessions we have coming up. And Zeus and I will return after all those sessions to connect the themes and share some practical takeaways for you.
