Contact center AI is often framed as a replacement story. UJET’s recent visits to customer contact centers suggest the sharper opportunity is much more practical: remove the work that slows agents down.
That was the central thread running through CX Today’s recent conversation with Kristin King, Chief Customer Officer at UJET, and Tena Curic, Senior Customer Success Manager at UJET.
The conversation brought together King’s customer strategy perspective and Curic’s onsite observations from recent contact center visits.
It explored what UJET learned after spending time inside customer contact centers, sitting with agents and supervisors, listening to calls, and observing how work really happens between the clean lines of a dashboard. Curic described the reality from the contact center floor:
"What stood out to me is how much of the job actually happens in between those obvious moments."
Understanding this gap is important because the industry often measures the result of an interaction, then misses the effort it took to get there.
A dashboard can show that a call ended successfully. It cannot always show the agent moving between customer records, billing systems, internal tickets, and knowledge sources while trying to sound calm, natural, and present.
For CX leaders, that hidden effort is becoming one of the most important places to look.
UJET’s Contact Center AI Lesson: Start With The Work Agents Actually Do
Curic’s onsite observations were striking because they were not built around abstract AI strategy. They were grounded in what agents experience every day.
She described sitting beside agents who were calm, knowledgeable, and empathetic, while still spending large parts of each interaction trying to assemble context from disconnected systems. That is where AI can help, if leaders point it at the right problem.
Curic emphasized that agents were not resisting technology. They wanted help with the work that added time and friction without requiring human judgment. Across the visits, Curic heard a consistent message from frontline teams:
"Help me move faster through the noise so that I can focus on the customer."
It’s a refreshing reality check for a market conversation that often jumps straight to automation targets. Agents do not need AI to take over every conversation. They need it to reduce repetitive lookups, status checks, note summaries, routing, and the manual steps that make good service harder than it should be.
Those tasks may look small in isolation. Across hundreds or thousands of contacts, they become a tax on agent focus, customer patience, and service quality.
Workarounds Are Warning Signs
One of the most valuable observations from the interview was Curic’s point about workarounds. When a tool does not quite fit a process, agents may not raise a formal issue. They often build manual steps around the gap and keep moving.
This workaround is familiar to anyone who has worked in a contact center but it is also easy to miss from the outside.
Workarounds can look like resilience, and in many ways they are. Yet they can also signal where technology is creating extra work, where processes have drifted, or where agents have learned to compensate for systems that do not support the way customers actually behave.
For UJET, the lesson from sitting on the floor was that these moments deserve attention. They reveal where AI can remove friction without weakening the customer relationship. They also show where automation could make the wrong problem worse if leaders do not understand the work first.
Remove The Right Work
King framed the issue as a question of control, context, and judgment. The market narrative often suggests that AI progress means removing agents from more interactions. UJET’s conversations with customer teams pointed in a different direction.