Agentic AI Is Trending – And Here’s Why It’s Worth The Hype

Customer service is going through a profound transformation, driven by rising expectations and technological advancements. Over the past few years, automated tools and chatbots have revolutionized customer service by becoming a trusted digital partner of human agents. And now, there has been a groundbreaking shift in customer support brought by Agentic AI.

Agentic AI has played a pivotal role in creating intelligent conversational companions that deliver human-like responses. As companies are changing gears to move away from traditional contact centers, they are increasingly looking to implement advanced AI tools that can proactively and autonomously handle customer queries. In this context, agentic AI emerges as the ultimate game changer and the perfect autopilot for your human agents. 

With agentic automation, companies get the capability to automate entire workflows and minimize human intervention because agentic AI even resolves complex customer queries. Let's dive in to understand more about the technology and how it can transform modern customer support.

Also read: CCaaS — The Foundation For Scalable Customer Engagement

What is Agentic AI? How is it automating customer service?

Agentic AI is like an AI with its own brain and initiative. It doesn’t wait for directions – it figures things out, makes decisions, and takes action all on its own. Agentic AI is emerging as a powerful innovation in customer service, enabling a more dynamic and effective collaboration between humans and AI to enhance customer interactions. Ever since generative AI transformed chatbots, it’s been gaining traction and creating exciting new opportunities for businesses to grow.

As businesses are rethinking their customer service approach in a bid to elevate customer experience, new Cisco research reveals overwhelming demand for agentic AI. By 2028, 68% of all customer service and support interactions with technology vendors are expected to be handled by agentic AI. This transformation is going to be driven by agentic AI’s potential to perform seamless interactions and create a more efficient and resilient support environment by assisting human agents.

How will it be possible? Generative AI-powered large language models (LLMs) are the core technology behind agentic AI. It has cognitive capabilities and is built on an architecture that mimics human behavior. Just like a human agent would do, agentic AI follows a similar process of first understanding a query, then gathering necessary data to apply reasoning, and using certain tools to execute the activities. 

Since customer queries are often lengthy and complex, agentic AI utilizes its memory modules to store and retrieve conversational data. And, to further ensure human intervention remains minimal, the guardrails set within the models stay within defined limits and only perform actions that are approved by human agents. Such smooth functioning streamlines customer conversations so that human agents can get the assistance they require to only focus on highly empathetic tasks.

One engine, endless possibilities. Agentic AI across industries.

Technology that thinks and acts on its own is reshaping how businesses operate. This ability helps companies make quicker decisions and deliver more personalized service. As a result, industries can stay ahead of the curve and keep customers satisfied. Here is a glimpse into how agentic AI is rewriting the rules across the board.

1. Retail & E-commerce: Personalized shopping assistants; automated customer support; order tracking and returns management
2. Utilities & Energy: Usage monitoring and alerts; outage reporting and updates; bill management
3. Banking & Finance: Fraud detection and alerts; loan application assistance; investment recommendations
4. Healthcare: Virtual health assistants; appointment scheduling; patient follow-up and medication reminders
5. Insurance: Policy recommendations; claim filing assistance; risk assessment automation
6. Travel & Hospitality: Booking modifications; real-time travel assistance
7. Telecommunications: Automated billing support; plan recommendations

How AI elevates customer engagement in contact centers

Agentic AI is designed to solve complex and unique problems on its own, and it does it through some exceptional capabilities that it possesses.

1. Self-learning ability: By following the continuous feedback loop technique, agentic AI learns by evaluating its outputs to refine its query-handling strategies. Through reinforcement learning and memory modules, the AI agent retrieves past experiences and trains itself through a trial-and-error process. By using real-time data and learning from dynamic customer conversations, it optimizes its performance to provide better outcomes in the future.
2. Contextual support to customer queries: As compared to traditional conversation AI bots, agentic AI has generative AI capabilities that use reasoning and data retrieval to provide relevant information instead of generating new responses. This allows the system to come up with personalized responses as the interaction advances, also leading to a great customer experience.
3. Seamless handoffs of interactions: Agentic AI first engages in customer interaction to resolve common questions by using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). By interpreting the human tone in a query on its own, the agent generates a contextual response. If the agent feels a human agent’s intervention is required, then it collects the entire data of a conversation and seamlessly transfers it. The human agent is able to view the entire conversation history and continues the conversation where the AI left off, avoiding any disruption in the handoff process.
4. Analysis of customer interactions offers instant insights: For an AI model, it is an impressive feature to not just understand the current dialogue but also identify shifts during the conversation. Agentic AI intelligently spots changes in customer sentiments and intentions to analyze the pain points of customers and potential areas of improvement. It has the conversational AI bot capabilities to analyze the conversation and make informed decisions in order to personalize the conversation and reduce resolution times.
5. Multi-step resolution across multiple channels: Traditional AI often handles queries on a single platform and resolves queries step-by-step. They do not have the ability to manage the same query on different platforms, which creates siloed conversations. Agentic AI can orchestrate a customer’s entire support cycle autonomously without human intervention. It can resolve the same customer query through multiple channels. For example, it can assist a customer through a chatbot, collect their data through emails, and send them a resolution confirmation through a text message.
   
   

Also read: AI Summarizer: From Endless Scrolls To Instant Case Insights

Key benefits of Agentic AI. Proactive and always active.

Advanced AI makes your customer service profitable! There are numerous strategic benefits which businesses can experience which we will explore below.

1. Boosting agent productivity: Support teams can assign routine and simple queries to AI and focus on highly complex queries.
2. Ability to scale support: There are times when a business experiences a huge influx of queries and in such times, a tool such as agentic AI can assist them 24/7 through its ability to scale.
3. Integration across systems to automate workflows: Agentic AI seamlessly connects with different systems to automate workflows for routine tasks and customer communications.
4. Consistent and personalized support: With conversational AI bot capabilities, the tool maintains a company’s voice across multiple channels to deliver personalized support and ensure consistent service quality.
5. Higher customer satisfaction: Businesses can elevate customer satisfaction when they deliver prompt and tailored responses to make every customer feel valued.
   
   

Companies are weaving the technological brilliance of agentic AI with human agents’ creative capabilities. This combination creates a sophisticated system for customer support, which amplifies customer satisfaction through personalized and proactive support. OwlForce empowers support teams with a powerful combination of conversational AI, process automation, and intelligent data processing to make customer service processes efficient and autonomous. Businesses can automate customer dialogues and business processes to create an intelligent service environment. Explore solutions by ThinkOwl, and feel free to book a demo!