For years, the contact center industry has been grappling with a fundamental question: Are AI agents better than humans, or do human agents still reign supreme? As Metrigy CEO Robin Gareiss writes in a recent report, our data confirms what many customer experience (CX) professionals already suspect: The answer is, not surprisingly, it depends. The future of service delivery is not a competitive dynamic but a complementary one, based on strategically leveraging the strengths of both AI and human agents.
Metrigy’s global Customer Experience Optimization: 2025-26 study of 656 companies documents this strategic melding, revealing that 85.6% of companies already have humans and AI working together to serve customers. The most effective CX organizations don’t view this as a zero-sum game; they recognize that human agents and AI agents are intrinsically linked, with 40.8% of contact center supervisors viewing their teams this way now, and another 38.7% planning for this future structure.
AI’s primary function today is often enabling human agents to perform better, moving beyond basic functions like transcriptions and summarizations to directly support live interactions. It shines in five critical areas that empower human agents: task automation, information gathering, response suggestions, pre-interaction work, and agent feedback.
But understanding when AI should take over fully, or when it should merely assist, is the new challenge for CX leadership. This requires constant performance measurement and the use of sophisticated analytics tools. Our findings show humans as best suited for interactions dealing with complex issue resolution, requiring emotional intelligence/empathy, or involving unique customer circumstances. Agents, on the other hand, are best suited for interactions requiring fast data lookups, standardized responses, or simple transactional tasks.
From our research, we see a clear trajectory for AI’s involvement: It is on swiftly moving upward path. Increased usage is predicated on both greater customer comfort with AI service and continued advancements in natural language processing and context awareness.
For guidance on how to prepare for this future, see the report, AI vs. Human Agents.
