LAS VEGAS -- When used to enhance self-service and enable human agents to more quickly and thoroughly aid customers, artificial intelligence tremendously improves customer experiences, Anna Convery, Verint's chief marketing officer, told the audience during the opening keynote of the second day of Verint Engage 2026.
Investment in AI for customer experience is growing, Convery said, noting that 87 percent of companies are spending on customer-facing AI, 87 percent on AI for agent assist, and 84 percent on AI for workforce management and forecasting.
"The question is no longer whether to invest; that is happening," Convery added. "The question is how to invest, where to invest, and how to deliver success. Broad investment does not necessarily equate to broad results or guarantee results.
"We have to deliver results, today, not in a few years," she stated further.
However, more than half (51 percent) of customers say businesses fall short of meeting their CX expectations. Only one poor experience will push 79 percent of customers to switch to a competitor. "Losing one customer is a tragedy. When you multiply that, it becomes a revenue problem," Convery added.
Another issue for companies with less than stellar CX is that each time customers have an excellent experience with one company, they expect other organizations to do the same or they could move to a competitor.
Verint solutions are delivering, she said further, noting that they have contributed to a 16 percent reduction in customer churn, a 48 percent increase in sales, and a 12 times improvement in Net Promoter Scores with different customers. Additionally, Verint solutions delivered $10 million in savings with self-service, $70 million in savings in agent capacity, and $6 million in savings in consumer capacity, in select situations, according to Convery.
Verint bots for gathering knowledge for agents, drafting call summaries, and handling other busy work are saving agents as much as nine minutes per call, she continued. But benefits extend to more than just time savings, Convery said. "There is a human cost too, and that human cost is very expensive."
She pointed to research showing that 31 percent of agents leave their jobs in six months, in part due to dissatisfaction with the busy work. There is significant cost—$6.2 million per 1,000 agents—to replace them, according to Convery.
To help with that, Verint executives again touted the benefits of its Agent Factory, a product it unveiled on the first day of the conference. Agent Factory is expected to help agents move quickly and completely, help answer customer queries, and help with staffing and scalability issues, improving experiences for both employees and customers, according to Dave Singer, Verint's global vice president of go-to-market strategy.
Agent Factory also enables contact centers to quickly scale bots and human agents when needed, according to Singer, who said the solution pulls together and coordinates information from different bots to handle numerous customer requests, using conversational AI, and escalating to a human agent if the request cannot or should not be automated.
Singer added: "It's not about AI replacing humans; it's about the hybrid workforce, it's about each doing what is best in that moment for that customer and the ability to seamlessly orchestrate that customer experience across the hybrid workplace."
Among its strengths, Agent Factory could really help with employee staffing issues, which can be significant, according to company research. A recent company contact center study found the following:
- 46 percent of agents feel they have little or no control over their schedules;
- Only 30 percent of agents feel "highly engaged" at work; and
- 45 percent of agents cited a lack of schedule flexibility as a top frustration.
Agent Factory enables supervisors to quickly send notices to agents offering additional hours, which agents can accept or reject with a click. Similarly, agents can use the same feature to request schedule changes.
Like other Verint capabilities announced at the show or introduced earlier, Agent Factory capabilities are additive, not replicative of legacy solutions, according to Singer.