Customer experience used to live in the contact center, measured in call volume, resolution time, and agent metrics. Not anymore.
Today, CX spans every touchpoint: sales, onboarding, billing, logistics, and even back-office emails. Every interaction, from a delivery update to a support call, shapes how your company is remembered (or not).
As artificial intelligence adoption accelerates, the real opportunity lies in applying it across all these touchpoints. Keeping AI focused on just support is a missed opportunity and a strategic misstep.
When built into the tools teams already use, AI can automate routine tasks, enhance communication, and deliver contextual insights, turning customer experience into something every team can improve. Let's examine why redefining CX and using AI beyond the contact center is no longer optional; it's essential.
Today's CX is the sum of every interaction every customer has with a business. Before we can shift from AI focused solely on support and contact centers to the entire organization, there needs to be a broader shift in what constitutes customer service.
According to Temkin Group, companies that excel in customer experience have customers who are seven times more likely to purchase again. Yet most firms still funnel their CX and AI investments into a narrow 5 percent to 10 percent of their workforces in customer service contact centers, leaving tremendous loyalty-driving potential across their organizations untapped. That kind of narrow thinking is exactly why even customer-centric companies continue to frustrate their customers.
The reality is that employees across various departments, including sales, logistics, onboarding, and even reception, play a significant role in CX. A receptionist's first impression might have more impact than any automated voice menu. The disconnect between where companies invest and where CX actually is shows just how much opportunity is being left on the table.
When we stop thinking of CX as something that happens only inside the contact center and start treating it as every interaction between businesses and their customers, the real opportunity becomes clear. The future belongs to companies that empower all employees with AI, not only the small percentage who carry a support title.
What does a modern CX platform look like?
Modern communication platforms process billions of interactions each year, across voice, video, chat, and text. In 2020, WhatsApp reported handling more than 100 billion messages per day, translating to roughly 36 trillion messages annually. This volume highlights how customer experience is now shaped by distributed, real-time communication. This transformation presents a critical opportunity to use AI beyond agent support.
A modern CX platform delivers real-time transcription, sentiment and intent analysis, intelligent routing, and contextual responses, so teams can understand and respond to customers more effectively. When AI is part of the core tools on which teams rely every day, it becomes a company-wide advantage, making customer experience everyone's job.
If your CX stack can't keep up with how people actually communicate, it's an obstacle. Customers expect seamless, real-time interaction, not disconnected processes and long wait times. And teams deserve smart tools that help them deliver a better experience.
The voice channel in particular is poised for growth. While it has remained relatively flat compared to digital channels, natural language changes the game. Speaking is the most intuitive interface we have, and AI can remove the friction that made calling businesses so frustrating in the past. Instead of long menus and hold times, conversations can become the fastest, most straightforward way to get something done.
Agentic AI at Scale
When most people talk about AI in business, they're still talking about a narrow set of AI tools like chatbots, interactive voice response systems, or analytics dashboards that operate in isolation and need a lot of oversight. Already, AI's role in CX is rapidly evolving from these tools to smarter, agentic AI systems that support every team. Agentic AI doesn't just respond but acts. Agentic AI makes work smarter and self-directed. That difference is critical in CX, where success isn't just about automation, it's about intelligence that adapts and personalizes in real time.
However, the role of AI, especially in customer service-focused roles, has always been hotly debated and framed as a threat to human jobs when in reality, it's a lifeline for overworked teams and overwhelmed customers. An underrated but powerful use case for agentic AI in customer experience can be as simple as leveling up your front desk operations. Instead of answering routine calls, an AI receptionist can handle real tasks, like billing, scheduling, and solving simple issues in record time. And when things do need a human touch, it hands off the interaction with the full context, so customers aren't stuck repeating themselves.
This cuts down busy work so your team can focus on what actually matters. For businesses, this means fewer missed calls, better insights into customer needs, and a smarter, more responsive way for teams to work. The benefits of AI are undeniable: AI shortens response times, keeps support running 24/7, and gives teams the information they need to treat every customer interaction like a priority.
Equally powerful is AI's ability for hyper-personalization. AI can surface details about a customer's past interactions, such as a hotel stay from years ago, to make every conversation feel personal and relevant. At scale, this transforms the way companies build loyalty, turning routine service into memorable experiences.
It also redefines the role of human agents. Instead of fielding every issue, employees can oversee agentic AI systems, guide them, and step in when judgment or empathy is required. Think of it as moving from agent to orchestrator, a role that's more strategic, more rewarding, and more impactful for both businesses and customers.
Companies that prioritize customer service need to start thinking beyond agent tooling. If you're still treating CX as a support issue, you're already behind. The bar has moved, and customers have, too. The focus needs to be on building systems that can leverage AI as a shared tool to help the whole business run smarter.
The companies leaning into agentic AI now aren't just serving customers better, but also setting themselves up to outpace competitors, adapt quicker, and win. Next-gen intelligent virtual agents don't just respond; they anticipate and resolve customer needs. And as these systems mature, CX won't just be supported by AI; it will be defined by it.
Carson Hostetter is executive vice president and general manager of artificial intelligence and customer experience solutions at RingCentral.