The premise that AI represents the inevitable future of customer experience obscures a more nuanced reality: agents and supervisors consistently prioritise the removal of repetitive friction over wholesale automation, and poor implementation of AI tools frequently creates additional work rather than eliminating it. UJET's approach of embedding their team directly within customer contact centres—rather than relying on dashboards and quarterly reviews—revealed a critical gap between how vendors market AI capabilities and how agents actually experience them in practice. This distinction matters because it exposes a fundamental misalignment in CX strategy: organisations investing heavily in agentic AI and automation platforms may be optimising for speed and cost reduction whilst inadvertently eroding the agent confidence and contextual judgment that drive genuine service quality. The question becomes whether CX leaders implementing tools like Agentforce or similar agentic solutions are measuring success against the right metrics—are they tracking efficiency gains alone, or are they monitoring agent satisfaction and the quality of human decision-making in complex scenarios?
The implications for CX teams are substantial and immediate. Rather than treating AI as a replacement layer, the evidence suggests that effective AI strategy must centre on augmentation: removing the administrative burden that prevents agents from exercising empathy and contextual reasoning. This reframes vendor partnerships fundamentally—presence on the contact centre floor, not just in boardrooms, becomes a prerequisite for understanding whether a platform genuinely improves the agent experience or simply shifts workload around. For teams already operating within legacy stacks, this creates urgency around evaluating whether current integrations are actually reducing friction or compounding it, particularly as contact centre stacks built for previous generations increasingly block modern AI strategies. The risk is not that AI will fail to transform CX—it will—but that organisations will optimise for the wrong outcomes and discover too late that speed without empathy erodes customer trust and agent retention simultaneously.
In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Kristin King, Chief Customer Officer at UJET, and Tena Curic, Senior Customer Success Manager at UJET, about what they learned by spending time directly inside customer contact centers. Rather than relying only on dashboards, reports, or quarterl