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Agentic AI
Discover how agent assist can boost customer service efficiency with real-time AI support. Get faster resolution of tickets and inquiries, lower costs, and happier customers. Learn key benefits, top alternatives, and how to choose the right AI solution for your business.
Imagine your customer service team resolving inquiries 30% faster while cutting costs—without hiring more staff. Agent assist can make this possible.
Customer service teams face relentless pressure to resolve inquiries faster, cut costs, and maintain quality, all without expanding headcount. Traditional automation tools fall short when human judgment is required.
Agent assist bridges this gap by providing real-time guidance, suggested responses, and instant access to a knowledge base.
Instead of replacing agents, AI enhances their ability to handle customer issues efficiently. And the result? Higher agent productivity, faster resolution of tickets, and a better customer experience.
As AI technology advances, businesses can take it further with AI agents that operate autonomously to manage routine inquiries while escalating complex tasks to human agents.
This guide explores how agent assist can bridge the gap between automation and human expertise. It explores the potentially transformative impact of agent assist on operations, and how to determine if it’s right for your business.
Agent assist is an AI-powered tool to augment (not replace) human agents by providing:
This ensures that agents provide accurate and timely support to improve first contact resolution rates and reduce the need for escalation.
AI-driven customer service tools also reduce operational costs while improving customer satisfaction through faster, more accurate support. The result? Faster resolution, fewer escalation of tickets, and happier customers.
Three AI pillars power agent assist:
Each of these technologies plays a role in empowering agents, but not all agent assist solutions require every capability. Some may focus on NLP-driven chat support, while others use machine learning to refine recommendations. The key is aligning AI capabilities with business needs to create faster, more effective customer interactions.
With these foundational technologies in place, let’s explore how agent assist translates these capabilities into real-time AI support for customer service teams.
During interactions, agent assist can:
To make informed decisions, agent assist makes critical information readily available, including:
AI-powered agent assist helps businesses handle more inquiries, improve client satisfaction, and keep costs under control without adding more agents.
Reason One: 26% Faster Resolutions, 14% Higher Productivity
Did you know? AI-assisted teams resolve issues 26% faster!
Instead of searching through knowledge bases or handling repetitive customer questions, agents get real-time recommendations. AI suggests responses, pulls up relevant articles, and highlights the best next steps—cutting down response times and improving agent efficiency.
Research shows that AI-powered agent assist increases customer support agent productivity by 14%, with the biggest impact seen among less experienced agents.
Reason Two: 20% Higher Customer Satisfaction
Quick, accurate responses reduce wait times and errors. Research shows that AI-assisted customer service can increase satisfaction rates by up to 20%, as customers receive faster and more precise responses. Additionally, 61% of consumers prefer AI-powered quick replies over waiting for human assistance. When satisfaction goes up, so does loyalty.
Reason Three: 30% Lower Operational Costs
Shorter calls, smarter staffing, lower costs.
With AI helping to resolve customer inquiries faster, businesses spend less time (and money) on each interaction. Smarter recommendations also means fewer escalations, reducing costs while maintaining service quality.
AI-driven customer service solutions have been shown to reduce operational costs by up to 30%, as businesses automate routine interactions and optimize staffing needs.
Instead of constantly hiring new agents, businesses can use AI to manage higher volumes of customer issues. AI handles routine questions while human agents take on more complex customer interactions, making it easier to scale without ballooning costs.
In fact, 86% of business leaders using AI report an improved ability to scale customer service operations as their company grows.
Agent assist isn’t just for high-volume call centers. It’s for any business looking to improve response times, reduce costs, and enhance customer interactions. But is it the right fit for your organization?
If you’re considering AI-powered agent assist, ask yourself the following:
If you answered yes to any of these, agent assist could be a valuable addition to your business. Agent assist is only one of the AI-powered solutions to help in customer service.
Note that using agent assist is just one of numerous AI solutions. You can also use AI agents for fully autonomous workflows (more on this below), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to handle backend tasks, and other AI-driven solutions designed to optimize business operations.
Many industries are already seeing the impact of AI assistance:
AI enables faster, more accurate support, improving first contact resolution rates and reducing agent workload.
For example, Allstate, one of the largest insurance providers in the U.S., integrated AI-powered agent assist to improve customer interactions. AI now generates 50,000 communications per day, which human representatives review—resulting in clearer, more empathetic messages and less jargon.
AI helps financial institutions improve customer service, ensure compliance, and enhance security in customer interactions.
For example, BBVA, a major Spanish bank, launched "Blue," an AI-driven assistant integrated into its mobile app. Blue handles over 120 functions, including balance inquiries, transaction histories, and card management. BBVA’s investment in AI-driven support is already improving service speed and accuracy and will soon expand to South American markets.
AI-powered agent assist supports patient inquiries, appointment scheduling, and insurance verification.
For example, Ada Health, an AI-driven app, provides quick, free health guidance based on symptoms and risk factors. Backed by clinical data, Ada’s platform is available in 148 countries and 11 languages, with over 13 million users worldwide.
AI automates responses to employee inquiries about policies, benefits, and onboarding.
For example, Workday, a leader in cloud-based HR solutions, has introduced AI-powered agents capable of creating job descriptions, sourcing candidates, and scheduling interviews.
AI enhances IT support by resolving issues faster, reducing downtime, and providing instant access to technical resources.
Broadcom, for instance, implemented Moveworks' AI platform, resulting in 57% of IT issues being resolved in less than a minute. By integrating 1.Bot into Google Chat, Broadcom allows employees to instantly access solutions pulled from multiple knowledge bases in a single interface. The AI detects gaps in documentation in real time, enabling the IT team to update or create new knowledge base articles.
While agent assist enhances human efficiency, agentic AI can handle entire workflows autonomously. These systems can make real-time decisions, handle customer interactions independently, and adapt to changing inputs—all without human intervention.
AI agents are self-sufficient AI systems capable of managing entire workflows, responding to customer inquiries, and making intelligent decisions in real time.
Unlike agent assist, which provides recommendations to human agents, AI agents can act independently. They can:
For example, an AI agent in a contact center might handle routine customer questions—such as order status or billing inquiries—without ever involving a human being. Only when a customer issue requires nuanced problem-solving would the AI escalate the request to a live agent.
AI agents go beyond assistance—they make smart, proactive decisions.
As AI technology evolves, businesses are shifting from agent assist to AI agents to automate more customer interactions while maintaining high-quality support.
Agent assist is an AI tool that supports human agents by providing real-time recommendations, automating repetitive tasks, and improving response accuracy. It enhances agent efficiency and helps resolve customer inquiries faster while keeping human agents in control.
AI agents are autonomous systems that handle customer interactions without human input. Unlike agent assist, which provides real-time support to human agents, AI agents make decisions independently, responding to customer questions and escalating complex tasks only when needed.
Choose agent assist if you want to enhance human productivity.
Choose AI agents if you need AI to handle customer inquiries without human involvement.
Many businesses start with agent assist to boost productivity, and later transition to AI agents for greater automation.
Struggling to balance speed, costs, and customer happiness? AI-powered agent assist is your secret weapon. It reshapes customer service by empowering your team to resolve issues faster, slash operational expenses, and keep customers loyal–all without overloading your human agents.
Companies adopting agent assist aren’t just keeping up; they’re leading the pack. As AI advances, scaling your operations becomes smoother and more strategic with the integration of AI Agents.
Ready to transform your customer service?
Book a Demo with Arcee AI: Discover how Agent Assist can redefine your customer service.
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