June 15, 2026
TELUS Digital and Cresta Team Up to Run AI and Human Agents Side by Side for Enterprise Clients
TELUS Digital and Cresta have agreed a partnership that makes TELUS Digital a preferred implementation partner for Cresta’s customer experience AI platform, giving enterprises a single route to deploy AI agents, augment human agents, and analyse every customer interaction.
Enterprises that choose Cresta will contract directly with Cresta for the platform and engage TELUS Digital for the work around it: implementation, integration, change management, managed services and other professional support. TELUS Digital’s teams handle deployment and ongoing tuning across voice and chat AI agents, real-time agent assistance, and conversation intelligence, whether Cresta runs on its own or alongside a client’s existing CCaaS, CRM and other systems.
Software Meets the Floor
Cresta’s platform works across three connected layers: analysing every interaction rather than a sample, deploying AI agents that resolve customer needs on their own, and giving frontline staff real-time guidance during live calls. The in-the-moment support is the focus of Cresta’s recent product work, including tools that read what is happening on an agent’s screen and surface answers without being asked.
TELUS Digital brings something software vendors usually cannot: it runs contact centres itself. Its engineers sit with experienced agents and tune AI systems to each client’s real conversations, policies and tone. One recurring problem in AI adoption, the company notes, is the knowledge that drives the best outcomes tends to live in call transcripts and the instincts of seasoned agents, which most AI systems never capture. Because TELUS Digital operates the floor, it says it can feed that knowledge back into the AI through a continuous loop that ties each interaction to a verified outcome.
“The companies best placed to make AI in CX work are the ones living in it every day,” said Tobias Dengel, President of TELUS Digital, adding that operating contact centres directly informs how the firm deploys AI for clients.
The Market the Deal is Chasing
The tie-up targets a hybrid future that enterprises are already moving toward. In a survey of 815 CX decision-makers across 12 countries, conducted by Ryan Strategic Advisory and commissioned by TELUS Digital, human agents assisted by AI ranked as the leading service delivery model, ahead of human-only service, basic automation and fully autonomous AI agents. This preference tracks with what many CX leaders are seeing: rather than replacing agents, AI is changing what the job involves, pushing routine queries to automation and leaving people with the harder conversations.
The same survey found only a third of those enterprises run the automated quality assurance and coaching tools that build the feedback loops to turn AI spending into measurable results. The two companies say their combination tackles exactly this work.
Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta, said the customer service workforce is moving into a hybrid model in which AI agents and AI-assisted humans work together, and that enterprises need the right tools to drive satisfaction and revenue as they do. The partnership leaves room to extend into more use cases and markets over time.
