I’m Sorry Dave, But I Can’t Do That

LAST UPDATED: November 3, 2025 at 4:50PM

by Braden Kelley

Last month I had the opportunity to attend Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Nashville, Tennessee and following up on my article The Voicebots Are Coming I’d like to dig into the idea that companies like Klarna explored of eliminating all humans from contact centers. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

When I first heard that Klarna was going to eliminate humans from their contact centers and go all in on artificial intelligence I thought to myself that they would likely live to regret it. Don’t get me wrong, artificial intelligence (AI) voicebots and chatbots can be incredibly useful, and that proves out in the real world according to conference speakers that almost half of Fanatics calls are automated on the phone without getting to an agent. A lot of people are experimenting with AI but AI is no longer experimental. What Klarna learned is that when you choose to use AI to reduce your number of human agents, then if the AI is down you don’t have the ability anymore to just call in off duty agents to serve your customers.

But, on the flip side we know that having AI customer service agents as part of your agent mix can have very positive impacts on the business. Small businesses like Brothers That Just Do Gutters have found that using AI agents increased their scheduling of estimate visits over humans alone. National Debt Relief automated their customer insufficient funds (CIF) calls and added an escalation path (AI then agent) that delivered a 20% revenue lift over their best agents. They found that when an agent gets a NO, there isn’t much of an escalation path left. And, the delicate reality is that some people feel self conscious calling a human to talk about debt problems, and there may be other sensitive issues where callers would actually feel more comfortable talking to a voicebot than a human. In addition, Fanatics is finding that AI agents are resolving some issues FASTER than human agents. Taken together these examples show that often a hybrid approach (humans plus AI) yields better results than humans only or AI only, so design your approach consciously.

Now let’s look at some important statistics from Customer Management Practice research:

• 2/3 of people prefer calling in and talking by phone, but most of that is 55+ and the preference percentage declines every ten years younger you go until 30% for 18-24
• 3/4 of executives say more people want self service now than three years ago
• 3/4 of people want to spend less time getting support – so they can get back to the fun stuff, or back to business

Taken together these statistics help make the case for increasing the use of AI agents in the contact center. If you happen to be looking to use AI agents in servicing your customers (or even if you already are) then it is important to think about how you can use them to remove friction from the system and to strategically allocate your humans towards things that only humans can do. And if you need to win support from someone to go big with AI voicebots then pick an important use case instead of one that nobody cares about OR even better, pick something that you couldn’t have done before (example: a ride sharing company had AI voicebots make 5 million calls to have drivers validate their tax information).

Finally, as I was listening to some of these sessions it reminded me of a time when I was tasked with finding a new approach for staffing peak season for one of the Blue Cross/Blue Shield companies in the United States. At that time AI voicebots weren’t a thing and so I was looking at how we could partner with a vendor to have a small number of their staff on hand throughout the year and then rely on them to staff and train seasonal staff using those seasoned vendor staff instead of taking the best employees off the phone to train temps.

Even now, all contact centers will still need a certain level of human staffing. But, AI voicebots, AI simulation training for agents, and other new AI powered tools represent a great opportunity for creating a better solution for peak staffing in a whole host of industries with very cyclical contact demand that is hard to staff for. One example of this from Customer Contact Week was a story about how Fanatics must 5x their number of agents during high seasons and in practice this often results in their worst agents (temps they hired only for the season) serving some of their best customers (high $$ value clients).

Conclusion

AI voicebots can be a great help during demand peaks and other AI powered tools (QA, simulations, coaching, etc.) can help accelerate and optimize both your on-boarding of full-time agents, but also of seasonal agents as well. But don’t pare back your human agent pool too far!

What has been your experience with balancing human and AI agents?

Image credits: Google Gemini

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