Containment is dead: Five takeaways from the AI ROI in Contact Center Summit

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. 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.”…