WEALTH October 4, 2026 0 Comments

Why AI Won’t Kill Contact Center Jobs—But Will Totally Revolutionize How Agents Dominate Their Roles

Ever wonder why everyone suddenly wants AI in their contact centers, as if it’s some magic wand that’ll zap all their problems away? Well, I hear that line almost every week—“We need AI!”—and my first thought is always: “Okay, but why exactly? What mess are you trying to clean up?” Here’s the kicker: most folks can’t give me a straight answer right off the bat. It’s like assuming because AI’s everywhere in your personal life, it should just slip neatly into business scenarios. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t always work that way. From where I stand, the real power of AI isn’t in sidelining your agents but in liberating them from the soul-sucking grind of repetitive tasks, freeing up time and brain space for the stuff that actually drives growth. And guess what? Industry pros and solid research back this up—this isn’t about slashing headcounts overnight but about smarter scaling and smarter work. So, before you rush in chasing the AI hype, ask yourself: are you ready to reshape your contact center not by replacement, but by reinvention? LEARN MORE

AI is reshaping contact centres, but the biggest gains may come not from replacing agents, but from using technology to reduce repetitive work and help businesses grow more efficiently, writes Lee Swire, CX and Contact Centre Lead, Damovo

Almost every week, a customer tells me they want AI. My first question is always the same – why? What problem are you trying to solve, and how will you know when it’s fixed? More often than not, they can’t answer straight away.

AI is everywhere in people’s personal lives, so it’s easy to assume that it will translate just as neatly into a business solution. However, that’s not always the case.

The contact centres that benefit the most from AI are those that start with a problem, such as high repeat-contact volumes or churn among agents doing repetitive, low-value tasks all day. AI is one route to solving those problems, but it’s rarely the only one.

The headline fear that AI will empty out contact centres doesn’t match what Damovo is seeing on the ground and what industry research confirms.

Gartner’s survey of customer service leaders, conducted in October last year, found that only one in five had reduced agent headcount because of AI. Most reported steady staffing even as they handled more calls.

Gartner went further, predicting that half of the organisations that attributed job cuts to AI will be rehiring for similar functions under different titles by 2027.

That tracks with what I’m hearing from customers. The ambition isn’t to shed people – it’s to grow without having to hire at the same rate as before.

Nevertheless, AI is changing contact centre operations. Forrester’s research suggests that by 2030 AI will have reshaped roughly half of what today’s customer service jobs involve.

That’s consistent with what we’re already seeing at trade shows and in customer conversations. The contact centre agent of the next few years looks like an AI supervisor, unblocking the AI when it hits something only a human should decide and feeding back to improve how it performs.

Attrition, not redundancy, is likely to do most of the work of reducing headcount over the medium term. Some forecasts put the eventual reduction at over a third by 2040, as roles aren’t backfilled.

That’s a very different and much slower story than the one AI headlines tend to tell.

This is also why the conversation is starting to move beyond cost-cutting and into growth.

Salesforce’s most recent State of Service research found that the large majority of service leaders now expect customer service to contribute a larger share of company revenue this year, not just a smaller cost line.

The interesting long-term opportunity in AI is the customer insight it generates – patterns in intent, cost-to-serve, and caller satisfaction that were previously buried in call notes and are now available to shape product and process decisions.

Meanwhile, the AI value Damovo is delivering today is under the umbrella of agent assist i.e. AI supporting the human agents.

We’ve seen how organisations handling complex conversations can spend significant time after each call manually documenting notes, outcomes and follow-on actions.

By using AI to automatically generate call summaries, that administrative burden can be reduced, giving employees the chance to reset before focusing on the next customer, patient or service user.

The result is not only a direct efficiency and cost benefit, but more time spent delivering the services that matter and helping with the cognitive load on your agents.

Customer conversation is part of a contact centre’s cost overhead. Another important cost line is staff attrition. Agents doing repetitive, high-stress work all day are more likely to quit, and recruiting, onboarding and training their replacements is expensive.

Taking the repetitive load off agents and giving them more interesting, judgement-based work is a measurable cost lever in its own right.

Some organisations with traditional contact centres don’t want to move to the cloud. Others are replacing legacy on-premises kit with online solutions that offer agentic AI.

Damovo helps customers to understand which vendor is best suited to them, based on their tech stack, existing integrations, and proven use cases with similar customers.

I think of it like buying a used car. A good salesman asks how many people you need to carry, how far you drive, what fuel suits you, and only then points you at the right option. It’s the same discipline in the contact centre.

Understand the business need and the proven use cases in similar organisations, then match the vendor to that. Damovo are consultants first and vendor-agnostic by design.

In regulated sectors such as health, government and policing, moving everything to the cloud isn’t realistic, whether for compliance reasons or because internal change cycles run slower.

AI can be layered on top of legacy, on-premises systems to support agent assist and wrap-up while the infrastructure conversation happens on its own timeline.

AI will cost some agents their current jobs, and I won’t pretend otherwise. However, the sector isn’t heading towards contact centres run entirely by AI.

It’s heading towards smaller, more specialised teams of employees doing the parts of the job that still demand human judgement and empathy, while AI takes the volume and the repetition off their plate.