AI in Customer Service Isn’t About Replacing Humans - It’s About Fixing the Experience
The 'AI or human jobs' debate is too simplistic
A recent BBC article painted a familiar picture: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly taking over customer service, human contact-center agents are on borrowed time, and soon we’ll all be speaking to digital assistants instead of people.
There’s just one problem: the reporter’s own experience with automated service chasing a parcel from Evri was… underwhelming. And that tells us something far more important than the talking-points shared by most of the analysts quoted in the article.
We still don’t live in a world where machines have eliminated the need for people in customer experience. We live in a messy middle where AI is making a significant change, but it has yet to replace people.
This is still a transition phase where the technology is powerful but imperfect, where workflows haven’t fully caught up, and where customers who simply want help can end up trapped in a scripted bot-loop wondering why companies think this automation counts as “innovation.”
Do you remember how a Google engineer was suspended in the middle of 2022 because he was worried that a chatbot he was working on had become sentient? It could have real-time conversations as if it were a child. This is how far we have come since then - now hundreds of millions of people are conversing daily with chatbots. many of them use AI as a trusted adviser - a coach or therapist.
AI is transforming contact centers, but it’s not yet replacing humans wholesale. It is reshaping roles and tasks, creating new ones, and demanding a new approach to service and value creation from customer engagement.
This is the real story that is missing from many of these mainstream headlines.
What the BBC Got Right
There is a profound shift already underway:
AI resolves simple and repetitive enquiries at scale - “where is my parcel” is a good example
Self-service automation is advancing fast - we have moved a long way from the LLM hallucinations
Companies are experimenting with fully digital contact flows - pilots and new products are now all around
Cost pressures make automation attractive - nothing changes, cost has always been a big CX driver of change
No industry leader can dispute that this is the direction of travel.
But technology hype always travels faster than operational reality - Gartner has been publishing their ’Hype Cycle’ for 30 years now. Customer experience is where tech hype meets daylight.
What was missing from the BBC report? Or, to put it another way, what is the real story?
AI isn’t just replacing agents — it’s supporting them
The modern contact center isn’t humans OR machines. It’s humans plus machines. We are now seeing Generative AI drafting customer responses, real-time agent assist surfacing knowledge and next-best actions, summarization tools reducing after-call work, and smart routing predicting intent and passing work to the right person.
This is helping to make the job better - reducing burnout and increasing productivity at the same time.
Customer-side agentic AI will change everything
Why don’t the mainstream media commentators see this yet? The next AI evolution isn’t AI bots answering all calls for companies - it’s AI working for the customers.
Tools like Alexa and Siri have been around a long time, but they are getting a major upgrade. Imagine this being a normal experience: “Hey Siri - cancel my broadband, renegotiate my monthly bill, and switch me to a better plan if one exists. You handle the chat. Wake me up if you need approval, but if you can get a better deal then just confirm it.”
Agentic customer agents will be negotiating bills, chasing refunds and complaints, and they will understand service terms and conditions better than humans. This is bot to bot negotiation.
Human value is changing, not disappearing
AI performs well undertaking certain tasks - understanding policies, pattern recognition, and language to name a few. However, people are still better than AI at many individual tasks such as complex judgement, talking about retention and loyalty, empathy, supporting vulnerable customers, and building trust.
If you want to build revenue and generate sales - real value - from your customer interactions then you can’t automate all those interactions. This is the classic ‘turn your cost center into a profit center’ argument - which can be a reality if you plan well.
The real future for customer service processes isn’t a complete replacement of people, it should be more meaningful human interaction between customers and brands and a reduction in repetitive tasks. This is good news for customers AND also those working in customer service.
Let’s face it, the industry needs a reality check.
If AI is ready now to replace everyone working in CX then why are customers still having such a poor experience and struggling to get help? Why is escalation still so difficult (see the Evri example in the BBC article)? Why are different channels still not connected despite talking for years about an omnichannel? Why do so many of the chatbots on offer feel so different to the experience any of us can have immediately during a ChatGPT conversation?
Because as Paul O’Hara recently explained on my CX Files podcast, the real challenge is not the AI software itself. The real issues are around data quality, integration, knowledge governance, building workflows, training, testing, quality - and getting the team to want to adopt these new systems. AI doesn’t work out of the box.
It’s infrastructure, not magic.
There is a new era emerging where customer service managers need to think beyond the contact center alone - they need a new stack or new ideas around how CX works.
AI can triage problems and handle routine tasks
Humans deliver higher-value support and provide advice that can include cross-selling
Agentic AI agents need to be integrated as if they are regular customers
The CX process has to become more proactive and focused on customer outcomes
Reducing the entire AI argument to “will jobs vanish” is extremely limiting and misses the need for a lot of industrial reorganization. This is really the silent industrial revolution that is being ignored.
The BBC article missed some key elements in this process, such as the use of AI to monitor customer interactions so a crisis can be managed before it blows up, proactive engagement with customers that can prevent any need for customer service, a shifting focus on just answering ‘complaints’ to addressing why customers have a problem in the first place (root cause analysis), human empathy becoming a key skill and blending support with sales because of this, and AI freeing human agents to become troubleshooters and relationship managers.
The role of the agents
This is the real evolution of CX using AI. The role of an agent as we know it may be eliminated because the human agents involved in customer service will be more skilled and more focused on problem-solving and building trust. They can no longer be jobs that hover around the national minimum wage if we want real experts.
AI is changing how humans work in the customer service environment, rather than replacing them entirely.
One day, perhaps AI will also be able to empathize and understand humans that need support. Look how far we have come in the past three years, but until this is easily programmable in bots, there will be a need to blend the tech with the people - balancing human empathy with automation.
The BBC should not simply be repeating the line that AI is rapidly replacing contact centers, they should be exploring how AI is forcing a reinvention of the entire customer experience. The near future belongs to organizations that can blend automation with humanity, not replace one with the other.
CC Photo by: Igor Omilaev