August 15, 2025
Agentic AI and the Customer Experience Maturity Curve Toward Human-AI Collaboration
Over the past decade, customer experience (CX) has expanded far beyond traditional call centres, to include chat, email, phone, social media and self-service platforms. But more channels hasn’t always meant better service and experiences. In fact, the explosion of touchpoints has left many businesses struggling with fragmentation – with siloed systems, scattered data, and a lack of end-to-end visibility into the customer journey.
Voice has long been central to delivering effective CX in complex, high-value interactions. But while it’s rich in context, it’s also one of the most underutilised sources of customer insight and historically difficult to scale or analyse in real time.
Carson Hostetter, General Manager & Executive Vice President, AI and Customer Experience at RingCentral looks at how today, that’s changing. Agentic AI represents a new standard of artificial intelligence (AI) that can capture sentiment, context and intent across every conversation for more personalised experiences across every channel.
Crucially, agentic AI goes beyond task automation. It marks a new era of intelligence: one where technology proactively supports customer engagement, deepens relationships, and reshapes how businesses interact with their customers.
The Limitations of Legacy CX
Before the pandemic, customer experience systems were fragmented but still functional. Businesses relied on siloed infrastructure that, while imperfect, mostly held together. But the sudden shift to digital during the pandemic exposed just how brittle these systems really were, revealing the limitations of CX strategies built for a different era.
In response, many companies adopted quick fixes such as basic chatbots, standalone tools, or automated workflows that addressed immediate needs without solving deeper integration challenges.
Legacy systems typically handle different parts of the customer journey in isolation, resulting in lost context and duplicated efforts. As a result, businesses miss out on the full picture. Key contextual insights get lost between channels and customers are left repeating themselves, resulting in inconsistent experiences that erode trust.
Today’s customers expect more. They want seamless, personalised interactions across every channel. To meet this expectation, businesses need more than websites and apps. They need an intelligent foundation, such as integrated journey analytics, real-time data visibility and AI-powered insights that preserve context and continuity from start to finish.
How Agentic AI is Changing CX
Agentic AI marks a shift from automation to augmentation. It doesn’t just complete tasks; it understands a wide spectrum of human communication, understanding the intent behind what customers are saying, how they’re feeling and what they’re likely to need next.
Unlike rule-based bots that operate within rigid scripts, agentic AI adapts in real time. It intelligently recognises intent, reads tone and identifies patterns across channels to carry conversations forward naturally, regardless of the touchpoint.
Its real power lies in collaboration. Agentic AI works alongside human agents as a partner. It surfaces relevant knowledge, anticipates needs, and provides timely nudges that guide both the customer and the agent. This collaboration reduces cognitive load on support teams, enabling faster resolutions and freeing agents to handle complex or emotionally sensitive issues – the moments that really matter in business-customer relationships.
Unlocking Human-AI Collaboration
We’re entering a new chapter in CX, one where AI doesn’t just support agents but transforms how businesses think about service. Agentic AI enables a shift from reactive models to proactive, relationship-led engagement. This evolution unlocks powerful new capabilities for businesses seeking both growth and customer satisfaction.
The key to this shift is voice. Despite being rich in emotion and context, voice remains one of the most underutilised data sources in CX. Alongside call transcripts, recordings and other unstructured inputs across communication platforms, agentic AI can now process this data at scale, surfacing context that was previously lost in silos.
With these insights, businesses can empower agents in real time, prompting them with next-best actions, personalised recommendations and predictive cues based on sentiment and past interactions. The result is faster, more accurate responses and highly personalised experiences that drive loyalty, trust and long-term business value.
Agentic AI is a catalyst that transforms customer experience from reactive support into strategic advantage. By embedding agentic AI into core operations, businesses gain not only speed and scale but also emotional intelligence. As experiences increasingly define brands, agentic AI offers the ability to deliver deeply human interactions, powered by intelligent technology, at scale. This marks the beginning of a new kind of relationship between business and customer.
