Every vendor event has a center of gravity, and at theCUBE Research’s AI ROI in Contact Center Summit, it wasn’t a product. It was a metric this industry is finally ready to abandon.
I co-hosted the summit recently with Bob Laliberte (pictured, left), principal analyst at theCUBE Research, and spoke with executives from Cisco Systems Inc., Five9 Inc., Zoom Communications Inc., Talkdesk Inc., and Converged Technology Professionals, an implementation partner. One of the event’s notable aspects was its focus not only on artificial intelligence, now table stakes, but also on how consistently vendors pushed back on the vocabulary, metrics and deployment habits this industry built over the past two years.
Here are my five takeaways for customer experience and information technology leaders from the summit:
Agentic is here and can provide value today
The word has become a checkbox, and those building these systems know it. During his session, Vinod Muthukrishnan, vice president and general manager of Webex Customer Experience at Cisco, addressed this. “I feel all of us have bandied the word agentic around a little too liberally,” he said. “An AI agent that can fill a slot or fulfill a transaction is not agentic. Agentic is much more of a framework of tools, products and processes.”
His positioning offers an excellent way to think about the AI maturity model in CX. The industry is moving from orchestrating a conversation to orchestrating a journey to building a relationship. Each step up that ladder widens the blast radius, which is why his summary of the market lands: “It’s never in our lifetimes been easier to build an AI agent,” he said. “It’s never been harder to make it enterprise-grade.”
Pedro Andrade, vice president of AI at Talkdesk, made the same argument from a different perspective. Talkdesk now positions itself around customer experience automation, or CXA, and Andrade carefully defined it as something other than a product.
“It’s not a category of technology. It’s the system that coordinates a hybrid workforce of AI and human employees,” he said. “It’s an operating model shift. It’s not a tool purchase.” According to Talkdesk’s research, roughly 74% of enterprises already have generative AI in place, and a generative layer alone “stops at the moment when you need judgment or an action that crosses multiple systems,” at which point a human is back to carrying data from system A to system B.
Amit Mathradas, chief executive officer of Five9, drew a line between generations. The prior wave was deterministic, “effectively a decision tree masked with voice capabilities.” The new wave is probabilistic, making complex use cases viable and explaining why the governance model built for interactive voice response doesn’t transfer.
Containment is a vanity metric, and cost savings understate the value
For a decade, containment and deflection were the primary ways to sell the return on investment of contact centers. Several speakers at the summit argued that this approach is no longer valid. “We are huge disbelievers in terms like containment and deflection, which I think no customer wants to be either contained or deflected,” Muthukrishnan said, then explained why: “Containment could well be me telling you I’m never calling you again. That is not good containment.”
Ram Rajagopalan, head of product for AI at Zoom CX, described the same migration as part of Zoom’s “conversation to completion” roadmap. The company now pairs a post-call survey with what it calls implied resolution, using a large language model to grade the outcome. “We don’t want to count customers who are frustrated and drop off as a call resolution,” he said. “It is certainly contained, but we didn’t resolve the customer’s issue.”
Andrade presented data showing that the cost lens is too narrow. Talkdesk segmented its survey base by maturity, and the organizations it calls CXA leaders reported roughly 22% net promoter score gains, versus 5% for the tier below, a fourfold spread. Cost per contact improved as well, but far less dramatically, at 57% versus 48%.
“Savings alone doesn’t show the whole picture,” he said. “They understate the value that you can get with AI.” He also named the metric that must change: “You are going to measure how much time it takes from opening of a problem until it gets closed,” back office included, not just average handle time.
There’s a cost-control version of this, too. Joe Rittenhouse, co-CEO of Converged Technology Professionals, has seen agentic projects hit their targets yet still blow up the profit-and-loss statement. “Customers are often surprised by costs,” he said. “They will tell us, yes, we’re driving revenue, but my bottom line has gone up so much,” he said. Metered, conversational and outcome-based pricing are not interchangeable, and few buyers have modeled their volumes well enough to know which hurts them.
The customer-perception gap is the industry’s real problem
An interesting data point from the event came from Mathradas, citing Five9’s research: “Ninety-nine percent of business practitioners in companies who are deploying think that their contact centers and their serviceability have gotten better,” he said. “Only 66% of actual users think the contact center has gotten better.”
Sit with that. A third of customers think service has gotten worse, and most of those say the reason is simple: “I want to access a human and I don’t get that.”
Five9 calls its answer “Humantic,” and Mathradas named three conditions that should route to a person: complexity, value and vulnerability. These include a complicated financial question and a customer filing a claim after a death in the family. Muthukrishnan arrived at the same conclusion using different data. In a healthcare survey Cisco ran, nearly every outstanding customer experience described one thing in common: “They mentioned a human agent by name.”
The people don’t disappear, but the job changes. Talkdesk built a role around that with its CXA Operations Center, and Andrade described the supervisor’s new role when he explained, “the supervisor role shifts from building scripts into behavior monitoring.” You evaluate an AI agent before it goes live — “It’s like recruiting, exactly the same thing. You do interviews. Well, in the AI world, you are doing evaluations” — and then run performance reviews and course corrections on it the way you would with a person.
Orchestration is the bottleneck, not the technology
Another key finding from Talkdesk’s survey underscored the importance of orchestration. Ninety-eight percent of companies have deployed AI somewhere along the customer journey, yet only 15% combine agentic AI with cross-departmental orchestration. When I asked Andrade why the gap is so wide, he said, “Adoption is easy. The orchestration is the hardest part.”
The barriers the data surfaced aren’t related to model quality or latency. They’re enterprise readiness: compliance at 50%, security at 48%, disconnected systems at 45%, and legacy infrastructure at 44%. That aligns with what I hear from information technology buyers.
Andrade noted that 64% of organizations already run AI agents for discrete functions such as billing or identity, and that it looks like coordination until you notice “this handoff between those agents still requires someone to go there and move the data from one place to the other.” That someone is a human with a spreadsheet.
Rittenhouse shared similar thoughts. His first question to a customer is whether they have an AI committee, and he said the answer is roughly 50/50. The progress he sees is organizational: “What we have seen is a pretty significant creation of jobs in project management.” Project managers report to the C-suite and act as “the choreographer of the business.” Projects fail because no one scoped the internal time commitment. “This is not just an IT project. This is not just a CX project,” he said.
Scope discipline is now a competence. Andrade time-bound it: Intelligent decision routing can go live in two to four weeks, and “if it goes more than two months, maybe you are trying to boil the ocean.” Rittenhouse offered the best “start small” argument I heard at the event. Ask a client what happens to calls after hours, and the answer is usually “I don’t know.”
At one physical rehabilitation facility where therapists answered their own phones, patients leaving the emergency room at 9 p.m. with a broken ankle were booking with a competitor by morning. Fixing after-hours coverage, he said, “resulted in millions of dollars in revenue” — from a roughly 30-day project.
Governance and openness are now purchase criteria
Muthukrishnan’s line on risk deserves attention from all IT and CX leaders. “Autonomy without accountability is a liability.” He added, “If you’re having a ‘build-my-AI-agent’ conversation in one room and a ‘how-to-secure-manage-observe-your-agents’ conversation in another room in 2026, you’re either in the wrong year or the wrong room.”
His comments are correct. Open-loop transactions, in which an agent touches customer data, acts autonomously, and communicates with an end customer, create a threat surface that scales with the deployment’s ambition. On openness, the vendors said the right things. Muthukrishnan called interoperability “both a cultural and a technological trait,” including for systems that compete with Cisco.
Mathradas made a parallel commitment: “You will never hear us at Five9 say you have to end the technology or toolkit you’re using for our capabilities to work.” Talkdesk decoupled CXA from its own contact center platform so it can run on a rival or on-premises system because “the majority of the seats are still on-prem” and those customers “can’t afford to miss the opportunity of AI.”
I told Muthukrishnan on air that I’m not convinced the era of the walled garden is over, though I hope he’s right. His response was that the walls are getting shorter, which is probably an accurate summary of where the industry is today. Treat openness as a contractual question, not a philosophical one, because, as he put it, betting the other way means “you’re assuming for the next decade this one company is going to own the innovation roadmap for the universe.”
Final thoughts
The next phase of contact center transformation won’t be won by whoever automates the most interactions. It will be won by organizations that connect their data, measure resolution rather than deflection, keep people in the seats where they matter, and build the internal orchestration to scale a pilot that works. The 98-to-15 gap Talkdesk highlighted is the story in two numbers. The technology is ready. Most operating models are not.
Here’s a video from the event with Laliberte, Muthukrishnan and Kerravala:
Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.
