AI helps contact centre agents in being more productive, says Genesys Chief Product Officer

For Genesys, how critical is the India centre?

India is an interesting and fast growing market for Genesys and the third largest development centre in the world – after the US and Ireland. India is a destination for talent who are fluent with AI, Large Language Models, workforce management for doing things like speech and text analytics, being able to extract sentiment, emotion from conversations, being able to schedule and forecast loads for agents doing voice recognition. We find the right talent in Chennai, Hyderabad and in Bengaluru. We have over 700 employees, including 300 in development, in India and 6,000 globally.

What does the India centre do on the AI front?

According to the Genesys State of Customer Experience (CX) report, AI is becoming a top priority for businesses, with CX leaders surveyed expecting to allocate 33 per cent of CX budgets to the technology over the next year. As the third-largest R&D hub at Genesys, the India centre is a leading contributor to patent filings for the company, playing an important role in advancing AI-driven, cloud-based experience orchestration solutions. In 2021, Genesys became the first global CX organisation to establish an in-country cloud deployment in India. Today, it empowers leading Indian enterprises such as AIonOS and Hexaware with secure, reliable and resilient solutions to help organisations increase customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and employee productivity.

How does AI help your clients?

AI brings a massive change in people communicating with each other. For instance, in a contact centre, co-pilots help agents to be more efficient and automatically summarise the conversation. Using AI, we extract the reason why the customer calls. So, all the different insights that generally take a lot of time for agents are done completely automatically.

But, will AI eventually replace humans in contact centres?

We don’t see seat compression in the BPO yet. We see AI is helping agents to address the number of calls that they cannot address with the number of agents they have. Also, in many countries, people still prefer talking to humans. But, in the long term, we’ll see AI replace humans and seat compressions happening in the BPO sector.

Can you give details on what your newly launched Executive Briefing Centre in Chennai does?

The experiential facility offers businesses a look at how Genesys is helping businesses transform customer and employee experiences through the latest advancements in AI, workforce engagement, and customer journey management. The launch is a significant milestone for Genesys India as a hub for innovation and collaboration. It enables hands-on engagement with experts across Engineering, R&D, Product, and AppFoundry partners, empowering customers to co-create tailored solutions and experience the full potential of Genesys technology.