Technology researchers from Gartner say conversational artificial intelligence will reduce contact center agent labor costs by $80 billion in 2026, with AI end-user spending to reach nearly $2 billion this year.
There are currently about 17 million contact center agents worldwide today, but organizations are facing agent staff shortages and declining economic environments that are leading to labor cuts. Now, many are beginning to turn to conversational AI to improve the customer experience.
According to Gartner, one in 10 interactions with a contact center agent will be automated by 2026, an increase from an estimated 1.6% of interactions today that are automated using AI, the research group says.
Gartner says conversational AI can automate at least part of a contact center customer interaction through voice and digital channels, voicebots or chatbots, and the technology is expected to bring transformational benefits to customer service and support organizations within two years.
Daniel O’Connell, vice president analyst at Gartner, says there is value in both full interaction and partial containment, such as automating the identification of a customer’s name, policy number and reason for calling.
“Capturing this information using AI could reduce up to a third of the interaction time that would typically be supported by a human agent,” said O’Connell, in a statement.
Although the benefits of conversational AI in contact centers are compelling, the technology still needs to mature before widespread adoption. Some of issues holding that maturity back include a fragmented vendor landscape and the complexify of deployments.
“Implementing conversational AI requires expensive professional resources in areas such as data analytics, knowledge graphs and natural language understanding,” said O’Connell. “Once built, the conversational AI capabilities must be continuously supported, updated and maintained, resulting in additional costs.”
Large-scale conversational AI deployments can take years as more call flows are built out and existing call flows are fine-tuned for improvement. Gartner estimates integration pricing at $1,000 to $1,500 per conversational AI agent, though some organizations cite costs of up to $2,000 per agent. Because of those costs, early adoption of conversational AI will be primarily led by organizations with 2,500 or more agents with budget for the requisite technical resources.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply