Modelling your contact centre AI investment: Avoid the hidden tax.
5 March 2026 | eBook
As contact centre AI deployments scale, the hidden cost of pushing every interaction through frontier-scale LLMs is becoming increasingly visible – in compute spend, latency, sustainability targets, reliability, data security and, ultimately, cost to serve.
By Sally Hodgin, Principal AI Consultant at Connect and Tim North Group Vice President of Strategy
While LLMs are undeniably powerful and there is no question that they work, contact centre operators must ask whether they are being applied proportionately.
In high-volume, structured environments like the contact centre, AI model architecture is no longer a technical nuance, it is a commercial strategy.
The operational impact.
In our latest eBook, Sally Hodgin, Principal AI Consultant at Connect and Tim North, Group Vice President of Strategy at Connect, discuss why the most advanced organisations are carefully orchestrating their use of AI models, combining Small (SLM) and Micro Language Models (MLM) with LLMs to get the appropriate level of intelligence for each workload, so that CX, cost discipline and operational resilience improve together.
Modelling your contact centre AI investment: Avoid the hidden tax.
Strategic “tax avoidance” is not about limiting ambition - it is about applying the appropriate level of intelligence to each workload so that customer experience, cost discipline and operational resilience improve together.
About'Connect.
Connect is a global customer experience specialist, systems integrator and digital transformation partner with industry-leading, technology-enabled capabilities. Founded in 1990, we’ve evolved alongside every major industry shift; from on-premise to cloud, voice to omni-channel, and now AI-enabled experience. Built on this extensive market experience, our approach is focused on delivering outcomes-based solutions that accelerate value, informed by what it takes to operate, scale, and continuously improve CX in live environments. We deliver end to end, from the network that carries customer contact, through interactions in the contact centre, to the integrated back-end systems that support them. This end-to-end accountability creates a unified view of the customer and operations, enabling consistent, reliable outcomes at scale.
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