Scott Steele, CEO of Thrive, discusses the use of AI in contact center operations, focusing on end-user support. The company uses ServiceNow as its primary workflow engine to maintain data across various platforms, ensuring accuracy and alignment across the business. Steele emphasizes the importance of policy, governance, and management in AI strategy to ensure successful implementation. Thrive’s main uses for AI in the contact center include process management, which involves understanding bottlenecks and improving customer experience. They have deployed automated work assignment through ServiceNow Task Intelligence and integrated GenAI capabilities, allowing engineers to resolve problems 36% to 38% faster without forwarding calls. This has reduced the time spent on the phone with customers and improved the route of calls. However, some agents still want to remain call center agents and are being moved to other call centers. As the industry continues to evolve, it is expected that autonomous AI agents will take on more decision-making responsibility. Steele predicts that in five years, AI will become the exoskeleton for individuals, making them bigger, faster, and stronger. As AI becomes more digital-oriented, chat will improve, reducing the need for voice-side assistance. However, Steele acknowledges that getting away from humans 100% may be difficult. Automation has already saved hundreds of thousands of hours and improved efficiency and cost structure, making agentic AI an opportunity for businesses to drive efficiency and cost structure.