People and AI: Necessary Allies

In today’s business landscape, a continuous debate surrounds how people and Artificial Intelligence (AI) should coexist. This discussion often lacks clear conclusions, reflecting the uncertainty of our current moment, where trends and visions intersect with analyses of AI’s evolving capabilities.

To add value to this debate, I’ll explore how AI and human expertise intersect within various economic sectors, particularly in contact centers, to create impactful solutions. By examining the dynamics within these industries, we can better understand how AI and people work together in a digital world that increasingly demands hyper-personalized experiences driven by both technology and human interaction.

Using the “Gemba” concept from LEAN methodology, which means “the place where things happen,” I will analyze why AI and people are essential partners in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), particularly in the contact center industry, with a focus on the retail sector.

Retail is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by the rise of the “phygital” concept, which blends physical and digital experiences. This evolution relies on data as a central asset, enabling analysis, segmentation, and the creation of e-commerce strategies that enhance customer experiences. Phygital environments often start with in-store interactions and extend to digital touchpoints, such as online marketplaces, chatbots, or voice support.

To illustrate this, let’s examine the primary roles of human intervention and AI in the retail industry.

How People Enhance the Retail Experience:

• Provide advice on complex or unique products/services that require specialized knowledge.
• Empathetically resolve customer issues and complaints.
• Create memorable in-store shopping experiences.
• Analyze customer experiences to inform strategy.
• Develop valuable commercial strategies.
• Adapt to unforeseen changes and help customers navigate them.
• Offer personalized advice based on customer preferences.
• Respond to product inquiries in real-time across multiple channels (chat, voice, email).
• Provide information on shipping and collection options, track orders post-purchase, manage complaints, and gather customer feedback.
• Share advice on product usage and maintenance.
• Gather qualitative insights from customer interactions.
• Identify emerging trends and customer needs.
• Offer feedback to improve products and services.
• Use customer data to make tailored recommendations.
• Anticipate customer needs based on purchase history.
• Support “click and collect” and handle returns for online purchases in-store.

How AI Empowers Retail:

• Perform predictive analytics on purchasing trends, generating insights for commercial strategies and assisting contact center agents in providing accurate responses.
• Proactively address potential customer issues by analyzing behavioral patterns.
• Enable hyper-personalization with recommendations based on purchase history and cross-channel interactions.
• Provide round-the-clock basic customer support via chatbots with natural language processing.
• Offer multilingual support to enhance accessibility and customer experience.
• Assist in e-commerce checkouts, in-store transactions, and marketplace purchases.

In a phygital retail environment, both people and AI play crucial roles in creating value across the customer journey. Their collaboration allows for an integrated approach to data, personalized assistance, and a consistent omnichannel experience, ultimately driving business growth and strengthening brand loyalty.

A Model for Other Industries

The retail sector can serve as a scalable model for other industries, such as healthcare, tourism, and logistics, where human and AI-driven technology increasingly converge across customer journeys. Technology should always serve a clear purpose, enhancing customer experiences and facilitating agent tasks—not merely existing for technology’s sake.

AI is ideal for handling repetitive tasks, analyzing large data sets, and providing quick responses to straightforward queries. It offers speed, accuracy, and processing power for substantial data volumes. Meanwhile, human agents bring essential qualities to the table, overseeing data management, ensuring quality and security, and governing ethical AI usage.

Ultimately, the impact of technology should free agents to focus on tasks that require empathy, creative thinking, adaptability, and complex problem-solving—qualities that are vital for building emotional connections with customers. People play a key role in questioning, exploring, and innovating to elevate customer service and operational efficiency beyond algorithmic outputs.

Building exceptional customer experiences and lasting relationships in contact centers requires a balanced approach that combines technology’s efficiency with human touch. The future of the contact center lies not in AI versus people, but in AI and people collaborating to deliver superior customer service.

This alliance has begun its journey, and we have to continue learning, moving forward because the most powerful data is the one we do not yet know.