AI in Contact Centres: Cityside Fiber's Andrew Rios on Skills and CX

What happened

Andrew Rios, who leads contact centre operations at Cityside Fiber, has spoken publicly about the forces reshaping customer experience in the telecoms sector — and his perspective carries the weight of someone who has worked every level of the support function. In an interview with CX Today, Rios argues that rising customer expectations, the accelerating adoption of AI, and a persistent shortage of genuinely coachable agents are the three defining pressures on contact centres right now.

Rios is candid that AI is not a headcount replacement strategy but a capability amplifier — useful precisely because it handles the repetitive and the routine, freeing human agents to handle the emotionally complex. His concern is not that AI will displace good agents, but that organisations will deploy it without first building the human infrastructure — coaching cultures, soft-skill development, psychological safety — that makes AI-assisted service actually work.

On career progression, Rios is direct: CX professionals who want influence at the leadership table need to speak the language of business outcomes, not service metrics alone. Connecting customer satisfaction to revenue retention, churn reduction and brand equity is, in his view, the non-negotiable skill for the next generation of CX leaders.

Why it matters

Rios's framing lands squarely in a debate that every service-design and CX leader in the MENA region is navigating: how do you layer AI into a contact centre without degrading the human moments that actually build loyalty? The behavioral economics answer is well established — customers weight negative experiences far more heavily than positive ones, and a poorly handled escalation after a smooth AI interaction can erase all the goodwill the automation created. The sequencing of human and machine touchpoints is a design problem, not a technology problem.

His point about soft skills is equally important from a service-design perspective. Coachability — the willingness to receive feedback and adapt — is a proxy for the kind of psychological flexibility that allows agents to read emotional context, shift register and recover a relationship mid-conversation. Organisations that hire for technical compliance and neglect this trait are building a contact centre that will underperform regardless of the AI stack sitting behind it.

The Renascence take

The conversation around AI in contact centres tends to collapse into two camps: utopian efficiency gains or dystopian job losses. Rios resists both, and that restraint is where the real insight lives. Most operators will miss the deeper point entirely.

The mistake most contact centres are making is treating AI adoption as a procurement decision rather than a culture change. You can buy the technology in a quarter; rebuilding the coaching infrastructure and psychological safety that make agents genuinely coachable takes years — and no vendor will sell it to you. The behavioral principle underneath Rios's argument is straightforward: discretionary effort, the thing that turns a transactional call into a loyalty-building moment, cannot be automated or mandated. It emerges from environments where agents feel seen, developed and trusted. A customer-obsessed operator should audit its coaching cadence before its AI roadmap — because the former determines whether the latter ever delivers on its promise.