From services as software to agentic AI: Reimagine the future of your contact center

Contact centers are where you keep your promises to your customers. It’s where quick answers, reassurance and support can turn everyday interactions into lasting loyalty.

But when the experience falls short? We’ve all been there: Increasingly impatient customers waiting on hold, repeating details to multiple agents and getting transferred to the wrong department. What began as a simple query can quickly spiral into a frustrating moment that erodes trust.

For decades, the contact center was seen as a back-office utility that resolved complaints as cheaply as possible. That perspective is no longer accurate: It is now a frontline engine of brand trust, loyalty and growth, and the pressure is real.

Customers demand personalized, omnichannel support in real time. Agents have to deal with fragmented tools and repetitive workloads that often lead to burnout. Leaders struggle to get actionable insights fast enough to steer operations.

It’s clear that contact centers need a new operating model — one that leverages both AI and human empathy, at scale.

The good news: this is the promise of agentic AI.

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Meet your virtual contact center staff

Picture this: You contact your insurance provider because your policy renewal seems confusing. Instead of sitting on hold or bouncing between agents, you’re instantly guided to the right place. This is the future of the AI-powered contact center, where a team of digital colleagues working alongside human agents, each playing a distinct role.

Here’s what it looks like in action on six levels:

1. Omnichannel service with AI routing: Whether you start with a voice call, a quick web chat or a mobile app message, AI picks up the intent immediately and gets you to the right place. No repeating yourself, no “wrong department” transfers.
2. Agentic AI agents as first responders: Let’s say you ask about a billing issue. There’s almost no wait because a digital agent instantly resolves your request or pulls up the right information for a human agent to inspect.
3. The “one agent” AI-powered desktop: If a human agent does pick up your call, they don’t have to juggle six systems at once. Their AI-powered desktop brings everything together to offer suggestions and next steps in real time. It’s like having a copilot on every call.
4. Real-time voice mining and agent assist: Imagine your agent getting a quiet nudge in their headset: “The customer sounds worried about cancellation. Reassure them and offer an updated coverage option.” This live coaching means agents can deliver smarter, more empathetic responses on the spot.
5. SmartCX analytics for predictive insights: Behind the scenes, every interaction feeds into analytics that spot patterns — maybe call volumes spike before renewals, or customers often ask the same three questions after a policy change. Business leaders get this insight fast, so they can fix issues before they snowball.
6. Ongoing improvement with AI retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models: The system never stands still. Every solved problem and successful conversation feeds back into the knowledge base. Tomorrow’s interactions become even smarter and faster than today’s.

In this way, your virtual contact center staff turn the contact center into a proactive, empathetic and efficiency-driven experience. AI handles the routine; humans handle the moments that really matter.

Behind the scenes, these agents are orchestrated through agentic business process as a service (BPaaS), the execution layer of a broader shift known as services as software (SaS).

In short, SaS is a new way of designing and delivering business services: modular, API-first, subscription-based and increasingly autonomous. And if SaS defines how services are packaged and sold, agentic BPaaS powers how they actually work, executed by intelligent agents instead of manual processes.

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Agentic AI in action: A new operating model

For most organizations, the ideal contact center feels just out of reach. You want customers to resolve their issues quickly and easily, without long waits or repeated explanations. You want agents to focus on meaningful work, not repetitive admin tasks. And you want leaders to have real-time insight to make better decisions.

This combination of seamless service for customers, empowerment for employees and clarity for leaders has long been the holy grail. With agentic AI, it’s finally possible. This is where NTT DATA steps in.

Let’s look at the numbers:

• By embedding agentic AI across the customer journey, we have found that contact center interactions can be resolved autonomously up to 50% of the time, reducing average handle time while keeping empathy at the core.
• Self-service becomes more intuitive, with adoption rising by 20% thanks to intelligent, experience-centric design.

And, because operational excellence is built in at scale, organizations are seeing results that make a real difference:

• Real use-cases show the cost of ownership dropping by 40%–50% through automation and right-shoring.
• Smarter self-service and routing contains 40%–45% of contacts before they reach an agent.
• Customer satisfaction rises by 15%–20% thanks to faster, more contextual support.
• Human agents are more effective, too, with 35% productivity gains from intelligent assist tools. And with root-cause issues resolved upfront, repeat contacts fall by 25%.

Crucially, these aren’t one-time transformations. With analytics and GenAI feedback loops, performance keeps improving over time, which shifts the contact center’s purpose from reactive problem-solving to proactive value creation.

Moving from strategic vision to practical execution

Bringing agentic AI into your contact center isn’t about buying a tool and hoping for the best. It’s a journey that should move from vision to reality step by step.

It starts with understanding where you are today. First, assess and align by looking honestly at your customer experience maturity, technology readiness and process gaps. From there, the best way to build confidence is to pilot and prove with focused AI use cases (think intelligent routing, proactive notifications or automated summarization) measured against clear KPIs.

Once you’ve proven the impact, it’s time to scale and integrate. That means expanding AI capabilities across customer journeys and channels and embedding them into your existing platforms.

Finally, because customer needs and expectations never stand still, you need to optimize and evolve, using real-time data and GenAI to refine continuously and stay ahead.

Easy access to full-time expertise

Many organizations find it difficult to move from small pilots to scaled impact on their own. That’s where having the right partner for your contact center modernization makes all the difference.

NTT DATA has helped organizations around the world to accelerate this journey. With more than 600,000 contact center seats deployed globally and over 45 years of industry expertise, we understand the operational realities. Our portfolio spans everything from customer experience strategy and contact center as a service (CCaas) to digital operations and intelligent platforms, backed by deep alliances with the leading AI innovators.

This combination of scale, experience and partnership means you don’t just implement agentic AI; you operationalize it with confidence, and you do it faster.

The contact center of the future is not a destination. It is a living, adaptive layer of your enterprise, and agentic AI is how we power it. Let us show you how.

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