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For Kaylee Harris, who works in customer service for a credit card company, a day at work now looks very different.
Her hours used to be filled with calls, note-taking and lengthy card disclosures. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, she can focus more on each customer, Harris told CNBC.
For Shannon, AI has also changed things — but not in a good way. She works in customer service for a telecommunications company in Cardiff, Wales, and did not want to share her surname for fear of being identified by her employer. She told CNBC that AI-generated notes at her current workplace are often riddled with errors, “so I just write my own.”
At her previous employer, a property services company, senior management told staff to “ChatGPT it” if they didn’t know the answer. AI agents booked appointments, but when they couldn’t offer a customer the requested date, they passed the case to a human.
Staff were “constantly fighting fires,” Shannon said. “All the complicated cases came to us, causing a lot of burnout.”
Good for both employees and customers?
In theory, automation in customer service should mean human agents spend less time on admin and more time helping customers with problems that require human judgment, empathy and experience.
Nikola Mrkšić, CEO and co-founder of London-headquartered PolyAI, which develops voice AI systems for customer service, said contact-center agents can face “maximum abuse for minimum wage.”
They often deal with frustrated customers while working under strict performance metrics, sometimes without the authority or information to resolve problems, he told CNBC. He sees AI agents as a way to help shoulder that load.
Maximum abuse for minimum wage
“It’s a really, really difficult job,” he said. “I think with AI, we have a shot at bridging the gap to make it better for both [customers and employees].”
British telecom and media company Virgin Media O2 launched an AI voice agent in September, which it said was designed to do just that. The agent handles routine issues so human advisors can spend more time on complex or sensitive cases.
At U.K.-based customer experience company ArvatoConnect, CEO Debra Maxwell told CNBC the company aims for 70% of interactions to be handled by technology and 30% by people.
One AI tool it developed for the U.K. government’s procurement agency, the Crown Commercial Service, generates draft supplier viability assessments with 97% accuracy, she said, reducing the need for hours of manual data extraction.
The mental load of harder cases
As AI takes on routine tasks, human agents may be left dealing with a greater share of complicated cases — and be required to pick up the slack when the technology fails.
The pressure on customer-service staff comes amid reports of rising workloads across the industry.
According to MaxContact’s 2025/26 U.K. Contact Centre KPI Benchmarking Insights Report, more than half of surveyed contact-center decision-makers said agent workloads had increased, up from around 40% in 2024, although the survey doesn’t establish what is driving the rise.
[R]elatively straightforward tasks can provide a bit of psychological respite between more demanding ones
Amanda Jones
King’s College London
Amanda Jones, who researches organizational behavior and the future of work at King’s College London, specializes in work intensification — the process by which jobs become more demanding over time. She told CNBC that AI could make call-center work even more intense if human agents are increasingly left with the toughest interactions.
“Some customers may already be frustrated by the time they reach that human,” she said. “One thing we sometimes overlook is that relatively straightforward tasks can provide a bit of psychological respite between more demanding ones. If those disappear, the intensity of the working day could increase considerably, even if the overall volume of work doesn’t.”
Jones cautioned that productivity gains may also bring more intense performance targets. And as routine tasks are automated, workers could lose opportunities to develop the experience needed for more demanding work.
“So, we could end up expecting people to perform more demanding work while simultaneously reducing the experiences that traditionally helped prepare them for it,” she said.
The human touch
ArvatoConnect’s Maxwell argued that average handling times may need to increase as employees take on more complex cases.
“We assess whether [human] agents understood the customer’s needs, exercised sound judgement and reached the right resolution,” she said. “Not whether they followed a script or hit an arbitrary time target.”
Call center agent talking on a headset while working or assisting on computer screen in a office.
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Harris sees the upsides of AI tools, despite occasional system glitches that create more work. But she worries that the push to automate is coming, ultimately, at the expense of customer experience.
“As a country, I think we are focusing on getting things done faster and choosing quantity over quality … resulting in customers being fed up with the way AI is being pushed on everyone,” she said.
Shannon also sees the potential benefits of using AI, but doesn’t think it should ever replace real customer service.
“I believe people buy from people; with AI you don’t get to experience that,” she said. “I go the extra mile. Can AI give that feeling? Can it feel genuine?”
