February 27, 2026
Level AI’s New Platform Challenges the Human vs. AI Debate in Customer Service
Level AI has announced a major expansion of its AI Virtual Agent platform, making the case that businesses have been asking the wrong question. Human agents or AI agents, it should never have been a choice.
The company is taking direct aim at what it calls the “siloed” virtual agent, AI tools deployed in isolation, disconnected from human teams and real interaction data. The result, in most cases, is an AI that handles simple queries and falls apart when things get complicated.
Research shows that 92% of customers still prefer talking to a human agent, and that preference is largely a symptom of how poorly standalone AI has performed.
The expanded platform addresses this through what Level AI says is a unified intelligence loop. AI agents and human agents share workflows, quality benchmarks, and real-time learning. The AI is trained on the habits of top-performing human agents. Every interaction, be it human or machine, feeds insight back into the system, and both sides continuously improve together.
The platform also includes a native voice stack with response latency under two seconds, smooth interruption handling, and an Automation Discovery feature that scans 100% of customer interaction data to identify the safest, highest-return tasks to automate.
Finding the Balance
Automating the wrong things is one of the most common and costly mistakes businesses make when deploying AI in customer service. The most effective companies find balance by using AI to handle routine tasks while keeping humans in the loop for complex ones.
Level AI says businesses can go from kickoff to live production in weeks, with implementation costs cut tenfold. One enterprise customer reported making more progress in four weeks than in the previous nine months with a different vendor.
The company’s CEO, Ashish Nagar, said: “By moving away from isolated virtual agents, we’ve created a system that prioritises a strategic human-AI blend, ensuring automation is never blind but rather a precision-engineered extension of a brand’s best performers. This creates a compounding loop of insights and learning where every interaction—human or AI—continuously trains and levels up the experience across the entire customer journey.”
The real winners in customer service AI, Level AI argues, will be the businesses that stop treating human and AI agents as competitors.
