On behalf of TeamsCX, I attended the Contact Center Expo in London, one of Europe's largest events for contact centers, filled with hundreds of booths, demos, and presentations. My goal: to gain inspiration for our product strategy and see which direction the market is moving in. The hot topic? AI, but that's no surprise to anyone anymore. AI completely dominates the contact center world.
Among all those impressions, I gained a few important insights that I would like to share.
The clear advantages
It makes sense that AI plays such a big role. The advantages are clear:
- faster customer service
- greater team efficiency
- better analysis and insights
- improved support for agents
The innovative power is enormous. You can sense that the sector is at a point where AI is going to permanently change the way contact centers work.
Visible disadvantages
At the same time, I saw exactly where things can go wrong. If automation is taken too far, interaction can sometimes become inhuman. As a customer, you feel that you are not really being heard. And in some cases, AI even leads to a poorer customer experience instead of a better one.
This confirmed to me once again: AI should support, not replace. The best results come when technology and human interaction reinforce each other, not when one drowns out the other.
Our own position: further than I thought.
It also became very clear that we are not lagging behind. In fact, much of what was presented as “new” is already up and running at TeamsCX or as a PoC:
- live transcription
- conversation summaries
- sentiment analysis
- an AI-driven knowledge base
That gave me a lot of confidence. We are not following the market, but actively moving with it.
It’s Looking good
What I take away from this:
- We have strong AI ideas and PoCs.
- The challenge now is to make these features even clearer and more useful for users.
- Integrations are crucial: AI only has value if it connects seamlessly to the systems that contact centers use.
- And the most important insight of all:
no matter how far AI advances, the human factor remains paramount.
AI should help, not replace. And for me, that remains the essence of everything I saw in London.