For some business leaders who have difficulty finding and retaining contact center agents, AI has stretched an existing workforce. Other leaders have been able to cut their contact center staffing.

One of the biggest selling points of artificial intelligence (AI) is cost savings—and that savings involves automating functions that humans previously handled. In the contact center, AI cost savings translates into compensation reduction, as agents become more efficient with interactions that aren’t handled independently by bots or self-service.

AI’s impact on staffing affects new hires and existing employees—in both negative and positive ways, depending on your position. In Metrigy’s AI for Business Success 2024-25 global research study of 697 companies, we have found the following:

In addition to making agents and supervisors more efficient, AI-enabled self-service also is automating customer interactions so fewer even require live agent attention.

More than 80% of companies are increasing their AI spending in 2024, and the top reason, cited by 75.4% of those companies, is that they recognize the efficiencies AI brings. They’re investing in the technology—a move that is reducing total compensation for 37.8% of companies. That means lost jobs and fewer new hires in the contact center for many companies.

FILLING THE STAFFING GAP

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Understanding the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the agent workforce has been and continues to be a challenge for many contact center managers and CX leaders. It’s a moving target, as Metrigy’s latest global AI research, the AI for Business Success 2024-25 study conducted with 697 companies, reveals.

In general, the contact center environment is as troublesome as ever. After dipping in 2022, contact center turnover is on the rise, our study shows: from 21.8% in 2022 to 28.1% in 2023 and a projected 31.2% in 2024. Among the reasons: Some agents aren’t capable of juggling the number of simultaneous and increasingly complex interactions characteristic of the modern contact center workload.

In addition to an inability to retain existing staff, companies attribute staffing shortages to factors such as company growth, an inability to find the right new people, and insufficient budget.

AI is proving its worth in face of such challenges. For example, companies in the AI for Business Success study report hiring 89% fewer agents in 2023 because of AI. Nearly 56% of companies say the top impact of AI in the contact center is reducing their need to hire as many new agents as they might otherwise have needed without AI.

Here’s a surprise: The study also shows reduced headcount through layoffs as another top impact of AI. At 36.8%, this is second to reduced hiring. As Metrigy CEO Robin Gareiss noted in her recent “AI Masterclass Ep.1: How to Make AI Impact Staffing and Management” webinar (available on demand), this is the first time companies are saying they are reducing headcount because they’ve implemented AI. The reasons are twofold: Not only is AI automating responses to routine inquiries, it also is making agents more productive.

All of this isn’t to say that there’s no hiring going on in the contact center. While the total number of agents required is shrinking for some contact centers, our data shows that most companies do continue to increase their total number of contact center licenses year over year. In addition, AI is driving hiring of a different sort, as well as offering the potential for skilled agents to move into new jobs.

With AI’s implementation in the contact center comes the need for a variety of experts. Two thirds of companies in the AI for Business Success study say they’ll be increasing the number of data analysts due to AI. Sixty percent say they’ll be adding security analyst positions, 56.2% will be bringing on more programmers, 50.2% more data scientists, and 38.2% content managers. To this latter position, most companies say all (47%) or some (34.2%) AI-generated content requires human oversight—and who better to take on that task than agents who are well-versed in a company’s products and customers.

For more insight on AI’s impact on contact center staffing and management, tune into Robin’s “AI Masterclass Ep.1” webinar. And, don’t miss out on episodes two and three:

AI meeting assistants are packed with powerful features to improve employee productivity and meeting workflows. So, which AI tool is best for your organization?

For many business professionals, opening a weekly calendar app can be fraught with anxiety. Among their concerns: How do they find time for heads-down, productive work with so many meeting blocks? How can they keep track of post-meeting to-dos? What if they join a meeting late or not at all — are they going to miss critical discussions and decisions?

As enterprises look to ease these concerns and address employee experience challenges, they may consider certain technology to improve meeting workflows and outcomes.

In Metrigy research on employee experience conducted in 2022, 55% of 250 companies studied globally had already identified in-meeting assistance for providing summaries and logging action items, notes and decisions to have the highest value among various types of AI-driven video meeting functions. Fast-forward to 2024, and creating meeting summaries has become generative AI’s top use case for employee interactions, with 80% of nearly 700 companies studied globally already using or testing this type of meeting assistance, according to Metrigy’s “AI for Business Success: 2024-25” study.

What to expect in an AI meeting assistant

AI meeting assistants serve many purposes before, during and after meetings. At a base level, using advanced functionality, such as machine learning and automation, AI meeting assistants offload tasks such as scheduling and rescheduling, meeting transcription and translation, notetaking, and creation of meeting recaps and summaries. Knowing AI has their backs, meeting participants can stay focused on the ongoing discussion or presentation and save time by not having to listen to meeting recordings for missed comments. As a result, meeting assistants can improve efficiency, boost productivity, and enable individuals and teams to reap more value from meetings, while, at the same time, making the meeting experience itself more enjoyable for all.

Naturally, beefing up AI meeting assistants has become a priority for meeting app providers, such as Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Zoom, as well as for standalone vendors vying for recognition. Many of these providers have tapped the power of generative AI to give their meeting assistants new and improved capabilities.

Beyond the basics, IT leaders should evaluate AI meeting assistants for their ability to support more advanced features and functionality, such as the following:

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New collaboration applications and features are rapidly transforming employee and customer engagement. To achieve maximum business benefit, regulated companies must be able to take advantage of these capabilities while also meeting compliance requirements. Failure to implement a proactive and future proof strategy not only reduces productivity, but potentially raises risk of non-compliance from employee use of non-permitted applications. In this webinar we’ll share approaches and best practices for ensuring that companies can achieve maximum value from their collaboration investments, while also meeting appropriate compliance requirements. Attendees will learn:

Say “Yes” to UCC Compliance for Better User Productivity and Lower Risk

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Dan Nadir, Chief Product Officer, Theta Lake
Garth Landers, Director of Product Marketing, Theta Lake

Date: April 11, 2024
Time: 12:00 pm ET

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Generative AI is all the buzz, but what’s really happening in companies–and how do employees and consumers respond to the technology? During this webinar with Metrigy CEO and study author, Robin Gareiss, you’ll learn the following:

AI Masterclass Ep 3: 5 Steps to Success With Generative AI

Presented by: Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: April 9, 2024
Time: 11:00 am ET

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AI, especially GenAI, present new concerns as older ones linger.

There’s no rest for the weary, especially those weary communication pros responsible for securing their workplace collaboration environments against internal and external threats. Today’s security landscape is one that is constantly evolving, at an ever-increasing pace, as new applications enter the workspace, and new features quickly become available for existing apps.

These two trends, now largely driven by the introduction of AI, especially generative AI, features require a rethinking of security and compliance approaches.

Over the years Metrigy has tracked how companies secure their communications, collaboration, and customer engagement applications and platforms. Unfortunately, as I’ve noted in the past, the results aren’t good. For example, in our last study of 440 companies, published in Q2-2023, just 37% of participants said their company had a structured plan for securing their WC apps. Preliminary data from our 2024 study, scheduled for release in March 2024, show roughly the same result. Despite ever increasing attacks on collaboration apps, the needle simply isn’t moving!

Attack risks are continuing to grow as well. Consider:

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Nearly half of the 697 companies that participated in Metrigy’s recent study on artificial intelligence already are using AI for customer interactions, with an additional 33% planning for adoption this year. Indeed, while interest and use of AI for customer interactions has been creeping upwards over the last several years, more companies than ever—38%—say they see this is the year that will be the turning point for them on acceptance for customer engagements.

Interest in and use of AI for employee interactions is moving along a similar trajectory, as our study also showed.

As companies ratchet up their use of AI, they’re likewise building up their internal expertise. In this study, 61% of companies say they have AI experts on their teams. However, nearly 52% also rely on their technology providers, and 37% say the same of resellers, consultants, and integrators.

Metrigy advises that companies deepening their reliance on AI, across customer and employee interactions, consider establishing a cross-organizational AI Center of Excellence. Today, 35.5% of all companies and 50% of the most successful companies in the study, as determined by improvements across a variety of business metrics, already have an AI Center of Excellence. Another 55% of all companies are planning to add a center, in an unspecified timeframe.

What is an AI Center of Excellence? The AI Center of Excellence, comprising people who have complementary skillsets and responsibilities, would be charged with functions such as:

An AI Center of Excellence will be particularly helpful for the 67.5% of companies that say they generally prefer understanding how technologies work before making selections for solving their business problems and opportunities., vs. the 32.5% that prefer trusting their decisions to tech providers. Having an internal knowledge center with a well-articulated AI buying criteria and an adoption framework is a highly compelling reason to establish an AI Center of Excellence.

Metrigy clients can discover more insights from this study, AI for Business Success 2024-25, here.

Chatbots and voicebots are widely used–and for good reason, when they are appropriately deployed. Companies use them internally to improve agent performance or to help employees get answers in HR and IT. They’re also used externally for customer interactions. What do Metrigy’s success metrics show regarding where to invest (and how much) in bots? And more importantly for customer interactions, what is the latest consumer perspective on using bots when interacting with businesses?

In this webinar with Metrigy’s CEO and study author Robin Gareiss, you’ll learn the following:

AI Masterclass Ep.2: Are Bots Helping or Hurting CX?

Presented by: Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: March 19, 2024
Time: 11:00 am ET

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Gen AI will greatly simplify, and speed up, management of UC apps and devices.

As a wave of generative AI copilots and virtual assistants have entered the market, generative AI is now poised to drastically change the way businesses and service providers manage and operate applications and networks. Much attention has been focused on the copilots that streamline productivity-related tasks. Case in point: Last year at Webex One Cisco introduced the Webex AI Assistant. Like competing virtual assistants (or copilots), Webex AI Assistant offers generative AI (Gen AI) capabilities such as meeting summarization, action item capture, and content creation assistance.

GEN AI FOR IT ADMINS

However, Cisco also announced that it was bringing generative AI capabilities to Control Hub, its administration and performance management platform for Webex and collaboration devices. These new capabilities provide IT administrators with powerful new tools to perform configuration tasks, or to troubleshoot network and application problems. These new Gen AI capabilities offer the potential to drastically change the way IT administrators manage moves/adds/changes/deletions as well as respond to application performance issues.

Currently, performing routine tasks such as configuring an endpoint or checking device health require administrators to navigate a series of screens. Troubleshooting may require also clicking through to a number of screens to identify a device or user and determine recent activity that could have caused the issue. With a generative AI assistant, the traditional menus are replaced by a conversational interface. Via this, bot administrators can perform routine tasks or conduct troubleshooting. More importantly, the bot can suggest next steps, highlight information that may be helpful for troubleshooting, and learn from actions taken to resolve the issue.

In Cisco’s case, generative AI capabilities within Control Hub extend to network infrastructure components such as wireless routers. As someone who once aspired to obtain Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification, the idea of a generative AI bot replacing hours of training, poring over user manuals, drilling down through menus, and even typing out command-line interface interactions is exciting. For administrators, such capabilities offer significant potential to reduce training costs and to speed the time it takes to perform administrative management tasks or to respond to application and device outages.

GEN AI FOR AIOPS

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The collaboration industry is closely watching appetite to pay for generative AI – and Metrigy’s research has shown how willing and how much companies are ready to spend.

As 2024 unspools, we’re certain to see generative AI as the persistent thread running through product announcements from collaboration application vendors, just as it will for employee experience platform providers, as I noted in my previous post. The implications of this technology are simply too big to ignore.

GENERATIVE AI FOR COLLABORATION

My colleague, Irwin Lazar, president and principal analyst for workplace collaboration technologies at Metrigy, sees generative AI as being nothing short of transformational in terms of how we collaborate and communicate in the next year and beyond. He points to many examples of generative AI-powered capabilities now available or coming from collaboration providers.

For video meetings: Invited attendees, whether in attendance or not, could receive meeting summaries and recaps. Attendees joining late could receive notes to catch them up on what they’ve missed prior to signing in. Attendees who do not speak the language of the speaker or other participants could request auto-translation or transcriptions. Meeting hosts could get sentiment analysis on participant reactions and conversational input throughout a meeting.
For team messaging: Employees could get assistance composing and modifying messages or receive summaries of messaging threads.
For email: Employees could get writing assistance, including tone and style.
Generative AI, perhaps like no technology before it, has gone from general awareness to widespread familiarity and use in short order. In Metrigy’s December 2023 global research study on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of unified communications as a service, which includes meetings and messaging, 85.5% of 386 participating companies said they consider themselves “very familiar” with generative AI assistants.

This is a case in which company size does not matter; for this study, we gathered input from companies both large and small. However, most fell within the midsize range of between 251 and 2,500 employees, with the mean employee count at 1,651 and mean annual revenue of $3.05 billion.

WILLINGNESS TO PAY FOR GEN AI

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