Talkdesk's Andrade: 98% deploy AI, only 15% orchestrate

Talkdesk's research puts a sharp number on a pattern many contact centers already sense: AI has spread wide but not deep. Nearly every company has deployed it somewhere along the customer journey, yet only a small slice combine agentic AI with cross-departmental orchestration. Andrade locates the obstacle outside the model itself, pointing to compliance, security and disconnected systems as the most-cited blockers rather than raw AI capability.

The distinction shows up in the outcomes Andrade describes. Companies Talkdesk classifies as CXA leaders report roughly four times the net promoter score improvement of less mature adopters, 22% versus 5%, while cost-per-contact gains separate the two groups far less sharply. Churn prediction and personalized recommendations show a similar spread, which is why Andrade argues that savings alone understate the value AI can deliver.

What that means in practice is a shift in the supervisor's job. Talkdesk built its CXA Operations Center around the idea that supervisors will evaluate, monitor and course-correct AI agents much as they do human ones, moving from writing scripts to watching behavior, and measuring time from opening a problem until it gets closed rather than average handle time alone. Andrade also pushes the end state beyond inbound calls into proactive outreach — service reminders, renewals, collections — on the logic that the call is usually the last step of a journey that began somewhere else. Whether that broader orchestration takes hold depends less on the models than on the governance and integration work the research says most companies have yet to do.