Tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are racing to give their AI agents real “agency”: the ability to reason, plan, and act on their own. It’s the dawn of what’s being called Agentic AI. And it’s about to completely change how customers engage with brands, fundamentally changing the customer journey.
If businesses aren’t ready, the coming wave of automated interactions may drown contact center agents before they even know what hit them.
When AI Found Its Voice and We Didn’t Listen
The roots of today’s Agentic AI trace back over a decade. Early voice assistants like Apple’s Siri (2011) introduced the idea of conversational interfaces, handling simple commands on smartphones. Following that came Amazon’s Alexa (2014), which popularized voice-controlled smart home assistants, further integrating AI into daily life but still primarily as reactive tools.
Then, in 2018, Google announced Google Duplex, an AI system capable of calling real businesses, like restaurants and hair salons, and holding remarkably human-sounding conversations. It could understand natural language, respond fluidly, and even mimic speech patterns like pausing and adding “um.” It didn’t just answer questions, it acted.
That moment marked the beginning of AI stepping beyond scripted bots and into the real world.
But the world wasn’t quite ready. The infrastructure wasn’t mature. Businesses lacked APIs, standardized data, and digital workflows. Consumers weren’t accustomed to autonomous AI; most still saw bots as frustrating IVRs or pop-up widgets.
AI-Powered Automation Is Already Here
Things have changed a lot. More mature voice AI and large language models (LLMs) are capable of handling vastly broader contexts.
We live in a culture more accustomed to AI assistance (e.g., ChatGPT, Alexa, customer service bots). Businesses are more digitally integrated with APIs, CRM solutions, and appointment systems. And there’s considerable interest in Agentic AI that acts on your behalf across tasks and chats.
Soon, consumer smartphones, laptops, or browsers could be quietly negotiating on their behalf with no supervision needed.
The most important leaders in the AI revolution are now making some very bold claims:
- Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. In an interview with Technology Review, he described the ultimate AI application as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.”
- Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. In an April 12, 2024 interview with The New York Times “The Ezra Klein Show Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Dario Amodei,” he spoke of leveraging Generative AI to make reservations, book an Uber, go to websites, and talk to other people.
- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. In a blog post announcing Gemini 2.0, he stated “Over the last year, we have been investing in developing more agentic models, meaning they can understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.”
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. In his keynote at Microsoft Ignite 2024, he discussed the evolution of AI, emphasizing the transition from copilots to more advanced agents and stated “We’re moving beyond copilots to agents that remember, reason, and act.”
The race is on to be the first in delivering bots with agency. And it’s going to change the world around us.
Gartner, arguably the leading analyst company in the world, has written many research notes and even a book on the topic. It has pointed out that bots with agency are about to become part of our everyday lives and it will have a profound effect on how consumers engage with marketing, sales, and support.
It’s critical, then, to be ready for the change this creates. Soon, consumer smartphones, laptops, or browsers could be quietly negotiating on their behalf with no supervision needed.
If Your Customer Is a Bot, Everything Changes
ChatGPT now serves over 800 million weekly active users according to an article published in Digital Information World, citing a Forbes piece: a tenfold increase in just two years. It processes more than 1 billion queries every day.
As these tools become fully autonomous, the implications for businesses, particularly customer service teams, are profound.
Most contact centers today are built for human interaction. They’re designed around peaks and troughs in-line with when consumers need help the most and are available to engage.
...bots with agency...[will] demand fast, accurate, and frictionless resolutions.
But autonomous bots don’t abide by the same principles. They:
- Don’t sleep, get frustrated, or wait patiently and they operate on a 24/7 cadence.
- Can submit tickets to 10 companies at once, follow up on all of them every hour, and escalate issues the moment a delay is detected.
- Can bypass websites entirely, pulling structured data from reviews, forums, and APIs to find the best answers.
If your brand isn’t visible where agents are looking, or if your offerings aren’t structured in ways bots can easily interpret, you’ll be invisible to the new gatekeepers.
Most importantly, bots with agency won’t be persuaded by sales language or overlook vague responses. They’ll demand fast, accurate, and frictionless resolutions.
Adding more agents won’t be enough. Staff will need to be skilled differently and the systems they use will need to empower them to handle a complete shift in engagement model.
How to Prepare for a Bot Future
Businesses must ensure their systems, data, teams, and governance are equipped to operate in a 24/7 environment where machines act as both customers and intermediaries. Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Start by understanding your exposure. Can your infrastructure absorb a surge in volume driven by non-human agents? Are your support channels built to handle always-on engagement? Stress-test your APIs, webhooks, and endpoints. Use simulated bot traffic to model sustained load and identify failure points.
- Optimize your data for machine consumption. AI doesn’t browse like a human. It parses structure. Ensure your content and data are structured for machines, not just humans. Make your FAQs, documentation, and service workflows easy for bots to digest and secure against misuse.
- Uplevel security to improve API frontlines. Bots will be probing for access. That means putting guardrails in place. As bots gain access to customer data, pricing, inventory, and workflows, companies must have a clear view of what’s exposed and how it’s being used.
- Be clear about ownership and accountability. Who’s responsible when a bot makes a mistake? Who owns the data it pulls and who answers for misuse? These questions won’t wait for regulators to catch up. From the European Union’s AI Act to state-level privacy laws, businesses will be held to higher standards of transparency, security, and control.
And finally, none of this matters if your people aren’t ready. “AI fluency,” namely understanding, communicating about and with, and using AI-driven applications, has become the deciding factor for business success.
Bot-to-bot support could help alleviate problems with capacity and quality-at-scale. However, businesses are behind if this isn’t already in motion.
The companies that win in a bot empowered world will be the ones that train their teams to collaborate with machines. This is especially true for customer service teams, who will need to operate in environments where AI agents play dual roles as internal assistants that help them resolve issues faster and as customer side agents that act autonomously on behalf of the customer.
Employees must know how to prompt, guide, and oversee these systems, validate their outputs, and step in when something goes wrong. This means developing new skills in data interpretation, decision oversight, and human AI collaboration.
AI fluency isn’t just digital literacy; it’s a mindset shift that prepares teams to work alongside intelligent systems as true partners in service delivery.
You Can Be Left Behind
Consumer adoption always far outpaces corporate readiness. While consumers are ready for bots with agency, the business world isn’t. The resultant delta in demand versus availability is likely to cause serious service delivery issues for many organizations over the coming years.
Bot-to-bot support could help alleviate problems with capacity and quality-at-scale. However, businesses are behind if this isn’t already in motion.
Consumers can adopt bots with agency technology with one mouse-click of Apple Pay. But organizations must complete extensive, selective adoption, get through pilot phases without getting stuck in “AI purgatory,” and ensure risk aversion because of the serious potential for brand damage.
In short, it’s going to take time to be ready. Now’s the time to get ahead, and stay ahead, of your competitors and be there for your customers.