AI Elevates Contact Centres to Strategic Role, ISG Finds

What happened

Research and advisory firm ISG has published new findings indicating that artificial intelligence is elevating the contact centre from a cost-management function into a more strategic part of the enterprise. According to ISG, organisations are increasingly deploying AI across customer service operations to reshape how contact centres are resourced, measured and valued within the business.

The report frames this shift as a broader repositioning: contact centres, traditionally judged on efficiency metrics such as call volumes and handling times, are being reconsidered as sources of customer insight, retention and competitive differentiation as AI tools take on a larger share of routine interactions.

Why it matters

For technology and operations leaders, ISG's findings reinforce a trend already visible across the industry: AI is not simply automating existing contact centre workflows, it is changing what the function is for. As routine queries move to bots, self-service and agent-assist tools, human agents and the data generated by AI systems become the basis for more strategic conversations about customer retention, cross-sell and service design — conversations that were previously the preserve of marketing or product teams.

This repositioning has implications for how contact centres are funded, staffed and measured. If AI is genuinely expanding the strategic remit of these operations, leaders will need to rethink governance, skills and success metrics rather than simply layering automation onto legacy structures.

The Renascence take

The narrative of the contact centre "graduating" from cost centre to strategic asset is a familiar one, and it tends to resurface whenever a new automation wave arrives. The real test is not whether AI expands the function's ambitions on paper, but whether organisations change the incentives, KPIs and career paths that have kept contact centres locked into an efficiency mindset for decades.

Most organisations will adopt the AI tools ISG describes without touching the underlying operating model — and that is precisely why the promised strategic upgrade often stalls. A contact centre only becomes strategic when its leaders are given a seat in decisions about product, retention and pricing, and when agents are freed from volume targets long enough to act on what AI surfaces. Buying the technology is the easy part; redesigning how success is defined and rewarded is the part that actually determines whether this becomes a genuine shift or another round of automation dressed up as transformation.