Category: AI.

Contact centre leaders are under increasing pressure to do more with less, improve customer experience, support agent wellbeing and meet ever-tightening compliance requirements, all while controlling costs. Yet many organisations are trying to solve these challenges without a clear view of where agent time is actually being spent.

The role of the contact centre agent is evolving - from a task handler to a knowledgeable, empathetic problem solver. Yet, getting the fundamentals right remains critical. In the past year, 30% of consumers globally stopped doing business with a company due to poor experiences.

Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the contact centre space is accelerating as executives look to keep pace with competitors and rising expectations. Yet, reports that up to 95% of AI projects fail reveal a deeper issue: many organisations are deploying AI before defining the business problems they are trying to solve.

In an effort to help gauge business readiness in the sector, unpack the challenges, and explore how leading organisations are unlocking the true potential of AI, Connect hosted an executive roundtable discussion, bringing together senior leaders from across industries.

With language localisation emerging as a key AI-powered competitive differentiator for customer experience, the technology is rapidly evolving from the text level to voice-to-voice capabilities — where translation happens in real time, without ever converting speech fully into text.

In a multilingual region like the European Union, or a multicultural country like South Africa, with its 13 official languages and differing dialects, language localisation is far more than a courtesy or convenience; it’s the bedrock of effective and meaningful customer engagement.

Modern digitally-savvy consumers expect artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interactions across the customer journey when engaging with contact centres today, demanding natural, fluid interactions that closely mimic conversations and experiences with human agents.

From the role AI is playing in transforming the risk landscape, with a new class of dynamic threats to data security rooted in generative AI (GenAI) models emerging, to the reputational and operational damage that hallucinations can cause, business leaders need to carefully consider AI in their risk management strategies and policies as adoption ramps up and the technology is deployed more broadly across the business.

In the rapidly evolving world of customer experience (CX), organisations are under growing pressure to modernise operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive operational efficiency, often through artificial intelligence (AI). Yet, approaches to AI deployment diverge significantly across the market.