Agentic AI Will Transform Communications
Our world runs on information. Communications is the art of getting that information from one place to another, whether that’s through telephony networks, or the internet.
Communications is a broad field, covering everything from mission-critical and life-saving information to outbound business communications, to private messaging between individuals. All this information is subject to the same limitations: networks can only process so much at once, and outages can lead to communications blackouts.
From managing traffic loads to supporting customers as they engage with network providers, agentic AI can automate and innovate across the communications space. Potential use cases include:
- Resource management – When traffic volumes surge, AI agents could take on the role of platform managers, adding capacity where required to maintain application performance dynamically. Thanks to their contextual awareness, AI agents are able to assess traffic volumes across an entire network, understand where capacity is available, and how to most efficiently reallocate it and reduce cloud costs during low utilization periods.
- Predictive maintenance – Agentic AI supports a proactive approach to network maintenance, by continuously monitoring network health and pre-emptively identifying signs of wear, or potential failures. Technology similar to this is already in use by utility providers: through a network of smart meters, they’re able to identify network outages before their customers call up and complain.
- Self-healing networks – AI agents learn from their mistakes. That means that when errors are detected, these AI agents get better at identifying configuration issues and divergence from expected performance baselines before service outages occur. The future of networks is dynamic, and AI-powered.
Agentic AI Will Revolutionize the Contact Center
For most businesses, the heart of their communications universe is the contact center. All inbound and outbound communications are handled from here. Often, larger organizations will employ human agents in their thousands to handle massive volumes of communication. Agentic AI is beginning to change that.
Agentic AI takes simpler tasks out of human hands. And there’s a lot of simple, time-consuming tasks in the contact center. Up to a third of agent time is spent on data entry. Not speaking to customers, not delivering solutions; just entering data.
And data entry is just one of the potential applications of agentic AI:
- Expanding self-service – The strength of agentic AI lies in its ability to independently find solutions to complex problems. Equipped with a knowledge of company systems and products, its capacity to support customer self-service will only expand. Whether that’s looking up information in systems of record, updating that information, or scheduling proactive outbound communications.
- Powering agent experience – Agentic AI can act as a real-time co-pilot for human agents, surfacing relevant information, suggesting next-best actions, or drafting responses based on real-time context. This speeds up resolution times and powers higher levels of agent satisfaction and overall performance.
- Balancing workloads – By continuously monitoring communication volumes and agent availability, agentic AI can dynamically route contacts to both human and AI agents. It can prioritize vulnerable customers and urgent calls or redistribute overflow to AI agents, ensuring efficient and fair workload distribution.
Agentic AI will take contact center performance to the next level. And it’s not just businesses who will benefit: customers are already making use of agentic AI to supercharge their own communications.
Agentic AI Will Empower Customers
Agentic AI adoption begins at the grassroots. From booking holidays, to looking up recipes, to drafting emails at work or at home, your customers are already making use of generative AI in their daily lives. As agentic AI proliferates and becomes mainstream, your customers will start using it as a tool to interact with your business. One day, we might see a world where the vast majority of incoming communications come from AI agents. We’re witnessing the rise of digital customers.
Recently, Google rolled out its generative AI model, Gemini, across all Android devices. Agentic AI systems are likely to follow suit. And there are any number of ways those systems might interact with your business.
- Basic service requests – Everything a customer might call up to resolve, an AI agent might also try. That includes requests for information, requests to update information, paying bills, ordering products, or cancelling a service. And the convenience of having AI handle these tasks might encourage customers to reach out in even greater numbers.
- Automated shopping – It’s not just existing customers who might use AI to interact with your business; potential customers might use an AI assistant to perform their own market research. If an AI agent calls up to request information on products and services, you need to be ready with essential information, which the AI can relay to the customer.
- Machine-to-Machine communications – Digital customers unlock opportunities for automation. By routing incoming AI communications to your own agentic AI for resolution, you can remove humans from the loop entirely, and automate a good proportion of contact center work. This system would require human oversight, to prevent small errors from spiraling into system-wide hallucinations, but the potential efficiency gains are enormous.
Your customers aren’t going to hesitate to adopt agentic AI in their personal lives, and neither should your business. Change is coming. You have to be ready to meet it.
