For decades, customer contact centres have served as a frontline of corporate engagement, handling everything from basic enquiries to complex complaints.
Traditionally, agents have relied on carefully constructed scripts to guide conversations, ensuring that each interaction adheres to company standards and ideally results in a satisfactory outcome.
However, as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger share of customer service workloads, the limitations of scripted interactions are becoming increasingly clear. Script-driven chatbots often falter when conversations veer off the expected path. They lack the flexibility or contextual awareness to respond to unusual questions, combine multiple requests, and ultimtaley, adapt in real time.
Now a new model is emerging that shifts the focus from conversational user experiences (CUX) to AI-powered agentic experiences (AX). This transformation could fundamentally reshape the way businesses approach customer service, moving from rigid dialogue trees to dynamic, context-aware systems that deliver faster, more personalised outcomes.
A new approach
Scripted contact centre operations have traditionally relied on manual dialogue design. Teams map out expected customer journeys and create branching conversation flows that both agents and chatbots can follow.
While effective in structured scenarios, these scripts are labour-intensive to design and maintain, and unsatisfactory when customer behaviour deviates from the plan.
The rise of AI-powered chat interfaces has only magnified these shortcomings. As more organisations deploy chatbots to handle incoming queries, they are discovering that static conversation designs simply do not scale. Bots can be trained to recognise common keywords or intents, but they struggle with compound or unexpected questions.
Moreover, optimising these systems can be costly and slow as modifying one branch of a dialogue often requires revisiting the entire structure. This rigidity makes it difficult to keep pace with evolving customer expectations or rapidly changing business conditions.
Enter the ‘agentic’ era
To overcome these limitations, many organisations are now exploring agentic AI. These are autonomous software agents capable of planning, reasoning and acting across complex tasks. Rather than following predefined scripts, agentic systems can use large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to infer customer intent on the fly.
This shift marks a profound change in design philosophy. In a CUX environment, bots attempt to fit customer requests into known categories. In an AX environment, AI agents interpret the request holistically, breaking it down into subtasks, prioritising them based on dependencies, and executing them in order.
Crucially, this approach enables dynamic conversation management. Agentic AI can handle interruptions mid-conversation without losing track of context. It can seamlessly return to the main task, incorporate new information, and adjust its response strategy without human intervention.
Personalisation at scale
The potential impact of this on customer experience is significant. Because agentic systems are not restricted to a static script, they can draw on real-time data from across an organisation’s ecosystem (billing records, purchase histories, support tickets, and even third-party databases) to shape their responses.
For customers, the result is a conversation that feels natural and personalised. Rather than being forced to follow a predetermined path of questions, users can explain their needs in their own words. The AI agent can understand multiple intents within a single message, extract relevant information, and deliver a resolution swiftly.
The business case for AX
For businesses, the transition from CUX to AX offers both strategic and financial advantages. First, it promises significant operational efficiency as automating complex interactions reduces the workload on human agents, allowing them to focus on higher-value cases that require empathy or nuanced judgement.
Second, it opens the door to richer analytics. Because agentic systems log every step of their reasoning and actions, they can provide detailed insights into customer behaviour and preferences.
Moving from CUX to AX is not without its challenges, however. The technology is still evolving and deploying it effectively requires careful planning. Businesses must ensure they have the right data infrastructure, security protocols, and governance frameworks in place.
They will also need to rethink how they measure success. Traditional metrics, such as average handling time, may not fully capture the value of agentic interactions, which prioritise outcomes and satisfaction over speed alone.
Change management is another critical factor. Employees will need training to work alongside AI systems, while customers will need to be assured that their data is being used responsibly. Transparency and trust will be vital to overcome any scepticism.
The future of customer experience
Despite these hurdles, the direction of travel is clear. As AI capabilities advance, the days of rigid, script-driven chatbots are numbered. Businesses that cling to the old model risk falling behind competitors that offer faster, smarter, and more personalised service.
Agentic AI represents more than just a cost-cutting tool as it’s also a strategic driver of growth. By embracing AX, organisations can transform their contact centres from transactional hubs into powerful engines that improve customer loyalty and deliver real value.
