How TCN’s AI Empowers (Not Eliminates) the Contact Center Agent

The contact center is at a fascinating inflection point. Typically defined by rows of agents handling primarily inbound calls, it has rapidly evolved into something a bit more sophisticated. Today’s contact centers regularly handle chats, emails, call routing, self-service and artificial intelligence (AI) bot solutions in addition to a complex agent scheduling algorithm. Plus, consumers are demanding more from, and instant, personalized communication across all digital channels. 

This shift in customer behavior, combined with the notion of “doing more with less”, has propelled the need for AI contact center solutions. At the heart of all this is TCN, a leading provider of cloud-based contact center software, with a clear position on AI – AI is not a replacement for the agent. Rather, it’s there to enhance your current operations by supplementing the agent’s capabilities. 

TCN’s position on AI

During TCN’s C3 2025 User Group Conference keynote, Jesse Bird, TCN’s chief technology officer, shared more about TCN’s product vision and how AI is changing how we work today. He explained the three core areas AI enhances, primarily focusing on agent augmentation, reporting and decisioning and agent replacement. He explained that AI helps agents and contact centers do more with less. In short, traditional agents of the days past are no longer the norm in today’s fast-paced, consumer-driven economy.  

How TCN is using AI today

TCN’s approach to AI in Operator is practical and currently being implemented in the three primary use cases mentioned, which will provide immediate value to contact centers.

1. Agent augmentation

As stated earlier, TCN’s vision on AI isn’t to take the agent out of the equation, but to make them more efficient without the additional workload. TCN’s agent assist tools help keep your agents engaged and integrated by providing real-time coaching, delivering next best action guidance and automated call summaries. Before this agent assist functionality, an agent would spend countless hours a day resolving issues, leading to fewer first-call resolutions.

Agent augmentation solutions work in the background as customer interactions occur, providing agents with real-time, contextual support. These can include surfacing the most relevant knowledge articles, suggesting a next-best action or automatically populating CRM fields in agent wrap-up. This eliminates the need for agents to search for information manually or perform tedious post-call data entry, allowing them to focus entirely on the customer’s needs and emotional state. Adding TCN’s AI agents will improve first-call resolution rates, decrease average handle times and deliver a more personalized and consistent customer experience.

Besides contact center agent assist, there are several other ways agents can use AI to help during interactions, including:

• Call summaries
• Detect emotion patterns through voice and tone
• Voice authentication
• Real-time language translation or accent neutralization

Ultimately, the challenges we face in the industry have not changed, but the solutions we have at our disposal to resolve and build processes around have increased our ability to meet these industry challenges head on. 

2. Reporting and decisioning

There is no doubt that AI was built to make our lives easier, and in the context of TCN’s Business Intelligence solution, it will make everything run more smoothly. Data is the lifeblood of any successful contact center, guiding decisions that optimize performance and customer satisfaction. TCN’s BI goes beyond basic analytics to provide actionable insights that can transform your current operations.

The information gathered through BI can lead to discovering top-performing agents, faulty practices, compliance risks and service issues. It can show how your contact center is performing and reveal productivity gaps and customer satisfaction levels. Knowing how these insights change over time will make or break your contact center.

TCN’s cloud-based contact center software platform has transformed organizations by automating data collection and turning that data into actionable insights that drive revenue. For example, TCN’s AI-powered Workforce Management (WFM) tool uses historical data and real-time trends to forecast call volume and automatically optimize staffing levels so you always have the right number of agents available. By leveraging AI in the WFM process, scheduling becomes more efficient and cost-effective. 

In today’s competitive business landscape, delivering exceptional customer service while maintaining operational efficiency is crucial. This is where AI-powered tools like BI and WFM can shine. 

Take a look at a few other ways TCN is leveraging AI for reporting and decisioning in the contact center.

• Scoring and risk segment
• Agent performance
• Post call transition, redaction, sentiment and summarization
• Compliance intent matching
• Predictive analytics and modeling
• Report building
• Workforce management forecasts

3. Agent replacement

Agent replacement and agent augmentation are often talked about interchangeably, and require the right balance when deploying either to a contact center. If not done correctly, the customers will be the first to have a bad experience, which translates to poor reviews or agent scores. 

Agent replacement looks at tasks that are routine and repetitive, which are better handled by AI. Again, this is not about replacing agents but about automating the mundane to free up human talent for more complex work. Services within this scope should be able to answer frequently asked questions, provide order updates and process simple transactions without the need for human intervention. 

Obviously, there are considerable cost savings when taking human capital out of the equation, not to mention the ability to reduce office space. However, this trend shift to self-service is where customers are going if they know they will get their issue resolved faster.   

Here are a few solutions that would facilitate agent replacement:

• Chatbot self-service
• Voicebots and voice-driven Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
• Smart intent flows
• Manage hold queues and IVRs

What’s next with AI in the contact center 

AI in the contact center is moving beyond even some of the basics covered here and is becoming a more comprehensive real-time “agent assistant”. The future of the contact center will be defined by advanced large language models (LLMs), conversational AI, agentic AI and an emphasis on ethical and transparent use. Agentic AI has some amazing possibilities and will continue to gain confidence in the industry as an autonomous agent working without continued human guidance, especially as it learns better awareness with soft skills like empathy, coachability and negotiation. 

AI is about building a smarter, more scalable system in which AI handles the heavy lifting and humans bring the context, empathy and judgment to all interactions.

To learn more about TCN’s AI solutions, be sure to request a demo and see how your contact center can augment agent activities today.