US contact centre agent jobs to fall 350,000 by 2031: Forrester

What happened

Forrester Research is forecasting that the number of human customer service agent roles in the United States will shrink by 350,000 by 2031, as artificial intelligence takes on a growing share of contact centre work. The research firm frames this not as a wholesale replacement of human support but as a structural contraction toward smaller, more specialised human teams working alongside AI systems.

According to the reporting, the decline reflects AI's expanding ability to resolve routine, high-volume queries autonomously, leaving human agents to concentrate on complex, sensitive or emotionally charged interactions that still require judgement and empathy. The forecast points to a multi-year transition rather than a sudden cliff, with the reduction playing out steadily through the rest of the decade.

Why it matters

For leaders running contact centres, this is a signal to start redesigning workforce and career models now rather than reacting once headcount pressure arrives. If AI absorbs the bulk of transactional volume, the remaining human roles shift decisively toward escalation handling, relationship management and judgement calls — which changes hiring criteria, training investment and how success is measured in service operations.

The forecast also reframes the AI-in-service conversation away from simple cost-cutting and toward workforce architecture: fewer, more skilled agents, supported by AI tooling, potentially handling higher-stakes interactions where the cost of a poor experience is greatest. That has direct implications for how organisations plan recruitment pipelines, agent progression and retention strategies over the next several years.

By the numbers

• 350,000 fewer US customer service agent roles projected by Forrester through 2031.

The Renascence take

Headline job-loss figures tend to obscure the more interesting shift underneath: this isn't really a story about fewer people doing the same job with help from AI — it's about a different job existing entirely. The skills, incentives and even the emotional labour expected of a "customer service agent" in 2031 will look quite different from today's role.

Most organisations will focus their AI investment on deflection and cost reduction, and miss the bigger opportunity: redesigning the human role itself around the moments AI can't handle. A customer-obsessed operator should be asking now which interactions genuinely need a human — and then building hiring, coaching and performance systems around excellence in exactly those moments, rather than simply shrinking the team that used to do everything.