{"id":96008,"date":"2026-10-19T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T19:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/?p=96008"},"modified":"2026-10-19T12:34:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T19:34:29","slug":"personal-agents-to-drive-more-contact-center-traffic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/news\/stories\/personal-agents-to-drive-more-contact-center-traffic\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Agents Will Drive More Contact Center Traffic Than They Offset"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From cancelling subscriptions to booking restaurant reservations, consumers are starting to hand a wide variety of work to personal AI agents<\/a>. So far, most of it doesn\u2019t require a phone call; The agent navigates a website, calls an API or works things out with a business\u2019s own agent<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But not everything can be resolved that way. A personal agent might have access to a user\u2019s inbox and any information they\u2019ve explicitly provided, but it likely doesn\u2019t have the full picture of their relationship with a business. Even cancelling a subscription could mean going back and forth with a company\u2019s agent or a human rep who has access to the business processes and workflows. Personal agents also hit roadblocks like security checks designed to keep bots out, or questions only a human representative can answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now consider what all that looks like at scale. Personal agents don\u2019t mind waiting on hold or calling for order updates or reservation confirmations as often as they\u2019re asked to. The hold time that tests a human caller\u2019s patience doesn\u2019t register for a tireless AI agent that\u2019s happy to wait day and night. A person might check on a delayed order once. An agent asked to keep an eye on it can call back every few hours until the order ships. An agent shopping for a better phone plan can contact several providers in the time it takes a person to dial one. Because it doesn\u2019t keep business hours, its calls can arrive at 2 a.m. as easily as at noon. Multiply that by every consumer who hands an errand to an agent and the volume quickly becomes astronomical. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While surging call volume isn\u2019t a new phenomenon for contact centers \u2014 they live through spikes during peak seasons and other seasonal disruptions \u2014 personal agents could turn peak volume into the new status quo. And since voice is already the most expensive engagement channel, organizations will want to be ready for a potential surge of agentic traffic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news is that contact centers<\/a> were automating customer conversations long before the current wave of AI and they\u2019ve been leading the agentic charge ever since. With many contact centers already pairing human representatives with AI agents, they\u2019re already on the road to meet this new influx of personal agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meet personal agents with agents of your own<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The best way to prepare is to meet personal agents at the front door with your own business agents. When you tell a personal agent what you want, it might understand the request but not have the tools or context to carry it out. It doesn\u2019t know the loyalty tier the customer qualifies for or what has to happen before a change goes through, so it improvises and often fails to get the job done. Meanwhile, the business likely already has an established process in place for whatever the customer is looking for. That\u2019s what the business agent brings to the conversation: your defined processes and workflows, as well as valuable context grounded in your actual business data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n