On October 21 Microsoft announced Contact Center Intelligence (CCI), now in public preview. Instead of asking companies to move to Dynamics 365 Contact Center, CCI uses an open connector to add Microsoft's AI agents to the contact center a business already runs, with Five9, Cisco Webex Contact Center and Avaya named as examples.
CCI is built around a Customer Assist Agent that can resolve calls and chats on its own or help a human representative in real time, a Quality Assurance Agent that scores interactions against standards a company defines, and a Service Operations Agent that Microsoft says is coming soon. Other features include voice biometric authentication during a live call, a built-in handoff to a human rep or Microsoft Teams, and usage-based pricing through Copilot Credits. Microsoft notes that some contact center vendors charge separately for API or voice channel access.
The big message here is that AI no longer requires a rip-and-replace. Whether you run a two-agent help desk or a full cloud contact center, the questions are the same: which routine calls could an AI agent handle, how cleanly does it hand off to a person, and what extra fees does your current platform charge to connect? Scoring every call for quality, rather than a small sample, is also becoming standard.
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Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog
