For a long time, the contact center's relationship with AI has seemingly been framed around one question: how many jobs can it cut?
It's an understandable instinct. Contact centers have historically been viewed as overhead, a necessary cost to manage rather than an asset to grow.
So, when AI arrived with promises of efficiency, the conversation quickly turned to headcount reduction, shorter calls, and trimmed budgets.
But that framing is leaving real money on the table.
Martin Kalinov, CMO at Voiso, thinks most contact center leaders are asking the wrong question entirely.
“The biggest misconception is that integrating AI in a contact center is mostly about cutting costs – shorter calls, fewer agents, that kind of thing," he told CX Today.
“But the revenue impact actually comes from better execution: reaching the right customers faster, prioritizing the right conversations, and reducing friction for agents during live calls.”
Cost savings and revenue growth aren't mutually exclusive, but right now, too many leaders are only chasing one of them.
Voice Isn't Going Anywhere
It's worth addressing a customer service assumption before going any further; that voice is on the way out, because the data says otherwise.
As digital channels have scaled, voice has consolidated its role as the channel where high-stakes conversations actually get resolved. Renewals, pricing negotiations, urgent issues – these rarely close well over async messaging, and customers know it.
Kalinov is blunt about the commercial reality, claiming that “as digital channels scale, voice consistently shows up as the highest-intent channel for complex, time-sensitive decisions.
“Digital is great for deflection and efficiency, but when revenue is on the line, voice is still where commitment happens.
“And let's face it, voice will always remain the premium channel for human interactions.”
For contact centers trying to grow revenue, deprioritizing voice in favor of chat and self-service often means deprioritizing exactly the interactions most likely to convert.
The Leaks Nobody's Measuring
Ask most leaders where their biggest inefficiencies are, and they'll point to idle time or average handle time.
This makes sense, as it’s visible, measurable, and easy to report on. The less obvious problems, the ones quietly killing revenue, are harder to pin down.
Kalinov points to a few that come up repeatedly:
“Follow-ups that happen hours too late or leads worked out of priority order eat away at conversion rates.”
But the deeper issue is visibility, as “leaders often don't know in real time which conversations are stalling, which queues are backing up, or where agents are struggling until it's too late to do anything about it.