AI Will Reduce Agent Labor Costs by $80 Billion by 2026

There is a transformation taking place in the contact center, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). While AI can replace some agents for routine queries, such as balance checks and other routine questions, its bigger potential is to make the jobs of human agents easier. In fact, research group Gartner (News - Alert) has estimated that by 2026, conversational AI deployments in contact centers will reduce agent labor costs by $80 billion, while global end-user spending on conversational AI solutions within contact centers is forecast to reach $1.99 billion in 2022.

“Gartner estimates that there are approximately 17 million contact center agents worldwide today,” said Daniel O’Connell, VP analyst at Gartner. “Many organizations are challenged by agent staff shortages and the need to curtail labor expenses, which can represent up to 95 percent of contact center costs. Conversational AI makes agents more efficient and effective, while also improving the customer experience.”

Conversational AI can automate all or part of a contact center customer interaction through both voice and digital channels, through voicebots or chatbots, and it is expected to have transformational benefits to customer service and support organizations within two years. Today, AI can automate about 1.6 percent of call center/customer conversations. The numbers Gartner has predicted mean that in a few short years, this figure will rise to one in 10. But, perhaps the more compelling application is for the AI to do the grunt work – collecting information about the customer and their issues – leaving the live agent to do the thinking and complex reasoning.

“While automating a full interaction – also known as call containment or deflection – corresponds to significant cost savings, there is also value in partial containment, such as automating the identification of a customer's name, policy number and reason for calling,” said O’Connell. “Capturing this information using AI could reduce up to a third of the interaction time that would typically be supported by a human agent.”

Edited by Erik Linask