Key Points
- Agentic AI revolutionizes customer experience (CX) by autonomously resolving complex queries, enabling proactive support, personalization, and seamless omnichannel engagement.
- Adoption is accelerating fast, with predictions of 80% issue resolution without human input by 2029 and major growth across industries like healthcare, retail, telecom, and finance.
- Privacy and trust are critical, requiring robust data governance and transparency to ensure secure, ethical use and build consumer confidence.
Many industry and business leaders are only just starting to get to grips with agentic AI. And already it is being hailed as a game-changer.
Intelligent AI systems capable of independent decision-making and action hold infinite potential. Being able to understand context, learn from experience, and adapt at speed will, of course, enhance complex problem-solving, create significant efficiencies, drive productivity gains, and boost revenue growth. But it will also take these benefits further in ways we can’t even imagine yet.
Forward-thinking businesses are buying into the power of this vision. It’s why forecasters expect a surge in agentic AI market value from $2.9 billion in 2024 to $48.2 billion by 2030. It’s also why global human resource executives predict a 327% jump in AI agent adoption over the next two years, with 80% certain that most workforces will have humans and AI agents working together within five years.
It will transform ways of working and open up new opportunities for entire industries, as well as business functions – none more so than customer service and experience.
How Agentic AI Is Reinventing Customer Experience
Today, customer experience is make or break: over 50% of people will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory experience.
And with consumers constantly switching between apps, websites, and in-store as they interact with brands, delivering an exceptional experience means providing a seamless digital CX.
Agentic AI promises to help brands do just that. By being able to handle complex customer inquiries, analyze data to understand the root cause of issues, and make decisions, take actions, and provide solutions on behalf of human agents, agentic AI is poised to provide smarter, more dynamic support. In fact, by 2029, it’s forecast that agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention.
Benefits of Agentic AI in Customer Experience
Agentic AI’s main benefits stem from the fact that it shifts customer support and the overall experience from reactive to proactive.
Key business advantages of agentic AI in CX include:
Autonomous Customer Support
As a self-directed problem-solver, agentic AI doesn’t rely on the pre-defined workflows or instructions that define earlier, more traditional AI models.
Its ability to make decisions, perform tasks, and interact with customers independently means agentic AI can better anticipate customer needs and proactively offer solutions and support, potentially preventing issues before they arise. And the fact it can do this autonomously means it can solve even intricate, multi-step queries quickly and intelligently, which will improve overall customer satisfaction.
Personalization and Customer Retention
Agentic AI doesn’t just solve problems, either. It also uses advanced analytics for real-time insights into customer data. This allows brands to further tailor interactions, recommendations, and support to individual needs.
Like autonomous and proactive support, hyper-personalized experiences boost satisfaction as customers feel like brands understand their needs and provide products and services that truly respond to those requirements. This, in turn, drives loyalty and higher retention levels.
Omnichannel Engagement
Experiences today need to be more than proactive and personalized. Customers jump between channels and platforms as they go about their days, and they expect companies to meet them where it is most convenient in the moment. They also look for a cohesive and easy-to-navigate experience that allows them to move between touchpoints without losing context.
Agentic AI makes it easy to enable this kind of omnichannel experience. The technology can manage interactions across various channels at speed and scale, ensuring continuity and minimizing friction.
Agentic AI Customer Experience Use Cases
Agentic AI’s CX capabilities are advanced – and will only continue to get more powerful. For most sectors, it will reinvent how they approach CX.
Let’s look at some of the immediate use cases for different industries:
Banking and Financial Services
In banking and financial services, agentic AI can act as a personal financial advisor, providing personalized advice and recommendations based on its analysis of customer data including:
- Income
- Spending and saving habits
- Risk appetite
- Financial goals
By analyzing an individual’s income, financial habits, and long-term goals, agentic AI can suggest savings plans, set up automatic transfers, and identify areas to cut costs.
Healthcare
In a sector with as many moving parts both at the payer and provider level, and where every second counts in patient care, healthcare can undoubtedly benefit from the growing use cases that agentic AI offers.
Appointment management is one such example. Agentic AI can monitor a customer’s health records, send reminders for regular checkups or follow-ups, and even schedule appointments.
This technology can also monitor patients remotely via wearable devices – especially important for those with chronic conditions – and create customized treatment plans as well as adjust them in real-time.
Retail
Agentic AI is also adding significant value in the retail sector, with automated issue resolution a key use case.
Agentic AI can resolve order issues and delayed shipments by monitoring and analyzing various data streams and automatically providing tracking updates, offering alternative products, or suggesting other shipping options.
It can additionally proactively manage inventory by monitoring stock levels, predicting demand, and automatically reordering products to help minimize stockouts.
Technology and Communications, Media & Entertainment (CME)
Agentic AI is rapidly reshaping the future of CX in Tech and CME. Use cases that are already emerging are:
- Technology: Agentic AI can automate ticket management – covering ticket tagging, creation, and routing – and the operations of IT service desks, involving tasks like password resets, software provisioning, and VPN troubleshooting.
- Communications, Media, and Entertainment: It can create and automatically adjust video, music, and other playlists based on real-time watching and listening habits, mood tracking, and calendar information.
Telecom and Utilities
In the telecoms space, agentic AI can monitor network performance in real-time and proactively detect and fix impending radio hardware issues.
In both the telecom and utilities industries, it can also automate and set up billing processes, handle payment inquiries, and resolve billing discrepancies. This reduces manual effort and improves efficiencies.
Considerations and Challenges
Although agentic AI may seem like something of a silver bullet, it does come with considerations and challenges that enterprises will need to address to uncover its full value.
Privacy concerns top the list. Agentic AI systems access and process vast amounts of data, much of it personal or sensitive. Without proper safeguards, this data is at risk of compromise – potentially resulting in theft, fraud, and other serious consequences that may come with financial and reputational implications.
Enterprises need to overcome these threats by establishing a robust data governance framework to ensure data quality, security, and compliance.
Trust and consent are critical elements of data privacy and security. Companies must be transparent and open with customers about data collection and management processes. They also need to explain how they are using data to improve the customer experience and provide the choice to opt out.
Embedding data privacy and security into agentic AI systems will go a long way towards building trust in the technology and accelerating adoption.
What’s Next in Agentic AI Customer Experience
As agentic AI’s uptake and capabilities grow, so will its potential to take customer experiences to the next level.
The next stage of its evolution is more context-aware interactions for more informed and accurate decision-making. That involves having a complete, real-time view of each customer’s journey to maintain a consistent experience with all relevant information relating to the query at hand – no matter what channel it is on, or how many times the customer may switch between channels.
It also means agentic AI systems having a better understanding of nuances in human language and adapting their behavior based on situational cues. This will make interactions more natural and intuitive, and ultimately elevate the experience.
Sutherland Can Improve Your Customer Experiences
Customer experience is the great differentiator of the digital age. And those who take the lead will be the ones who embrace the capabilities of agentic AI early on to provide proactive support that exceeds their customers’ growing expectations. Having a strategic partner with the expertise and market-leading solutions at hand will bolster this competitive edge.
Sutherland Agent Success
Designed to enhance the effectiveness and productivity of customer support, Sutherland Agent Success is a cloud-based AI platform. It uses natural language understanding and speech recognition technology to offer agents intelligent and real-time guidance and suggestions.
By integrating with omnichannel solutions and customer CRM and support applications, it also provides agents with instant access to contextual information, best practices, and troubleshooting tips for more effective and efficient query resolution.
