Are AI agents fixing customer experience, or are they becoming the latest layer in a stack that already asks too much of agents, customers, and IT teams?
That is the question facing many enterprises as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, contact center systems, ticketing tools, and AI applications converge. For Vasili Triant, CEO of UJET, the issue is that many companies are applying AI to the wrong part of the customer experience operation.
As Triant told CX Today in an interview, the industry’s current focus on automating frontline interactions risks misdiagnosing the real issue.
“The industry is experimenting primarily with voice and chat agents at the front end trying to automate on this premise that the actual human or the the actual contact center agent is the problem. Do I believe that we have it wrong? Yes, I one hundred percent believe we have it wrong.”
As enterprises race to deploy virtual agents, agent assist tools, and AI copilots, many are still operating on a software foundation that has grown increasingly hard to manage. AI can intensify friction if businesses simply attach new intelligence to old workflows, Triant said, citing Salesforce's recent partnership with Anthropic to embed Salesforce in Claude.
“Right now, everything that's happening is 'let's bolt an AI solution onto some stack.' So Claudeforce is 'let's bolt Claude onto Salesforce' in some aspect.”
The risk is that products positioned as productivity enhancers become another interface, another workflow and another operational dependency. For contact center agents already navigating multiple screens and systems, that can turn AI into a burden rather than a breakthrough.
Triant traces much of this complexity back to the rise of software as a service (SaaS) buying patterns, where new tools are easy to procure and difficult to unwind.
“The challenge that's happening within customer experience, within the SaaS world in general, is this complexity has been built up over the last 26, 27 years.”
Triant compared the problem to the shift from cable bundles to streaming services: each individual subscription seems manageable, but the combined environment becomes expensive, fragmented and hard to control.
“It's like, 'let's buy another thing and another thing' to keep adding other features on. And next thing you know, there's this massively complex stack that you and I have to deal with as business users. And the customers are just getting the outcomes from that and complaining that this is a frustrating process.”
The impact on customers is familiar. They hear agents say a screen is slow, an application needs to load, or another system has to be checked. For agents, the complexity becomes part of the job and for customers, it becomes the experience.
Triant believes this points to a deeper question: whether the CRM and ticketing layer should remain at the center of service operations.
“Ticketing platforms, CRM platforms... have created this complexity. And they started in a world where the idea of data centralization and data warehouse didn't exist.”
Many enterprises now have a more mature data strategy than they did when those systems became dominant. Customer data platforms, data lakes and data warehouses can provide a different foundation for customer context if contact center systems are built to use them effectively.
