One of the most fundamental changes that AI is poised to make in the contact center is how enterprises think about time – that is, time spent by agents, customers, and systems.
The most obvious impact may come in how enterprises view agent metrics, a point that came out in a recent webinar I moderated featuring Robin Gareiss, Founder and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, alongside Seth Johnson, CTO and Janet Vito, Senior Marketing VP at Cyara. Common wisdom says that AI will free up agents from handling more routine inquiries, leaving them time to deal with more complex, challenging customer problems. As a result, it will be neither fair nor good business practice to measure agents by how quickly they can get callers off the line.
“The old, ‘What is a good average handle time [metric] is going away,” Robin said. “I think we’re really resetting the benchmark.”
Average handle time also becomes less relevant for AI-handled calls, Vito added, since unlike human agents, the AI resource is essentially infinite. Therefore, “Whether the AI takes 5 minutes or 3 minutes to resolve a problem isn’t really going to cost more.”
We’re going to address the nexus of technology, agent experience, and customer needs in a keynote panel at Enterprise Connect 2026 in Las Vegas March 10 – 12. This session on Wednesday, March 11 is titled, CX Panel: Does More Technology = Happier Customers? and our aim is to help you better understand how the rapidly-advancing AI technologies match up to improved results for the customer. Our moderator, analyst Sheila McGee-Smith, will guide a thought leader panel through questions such as: Do customers want to do more self-service? Can agents really handle more complex and contentious customer problems, or will they burn out? What tools do we have to improve agent and customer experience, and how do we know they work?
CX’s importance continues to grow in the world of enterprise communications, both at the cutting edge and at the legacy core. Companies continue to look toward CX for early AI wins, and I’m delighted that EC Advisory Board member Sinead Aylward of Johnson Controls will be presenting a breakout session on how contact center leaders should approach AI, entitled, Forget the Moonshot: Build Your AI Strategy One Micro Win at a Time.
At the other end of the spectrum, a pair of leaders from The Hartford will address a topic that’s every bit as critical – even more so, arguably: Reliability Engineering: When the Contact Center Can Never Go Down. After all, the most dazzling AI technology in the world is useless if your customers can’t reach the contact center through the network.
I’m excited about having enterprise leaders sharing their knowledge at EC2026, and about presenting the next round of innovation in AI, not just for CX, but for collaboration platforms, AV systems, security, and more. I hope you can join us next March in Las Vegas.
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