AiThority Interview with Jonathan Kershaw, Director of Product Management, Vonage

 Jonathan Kershaw, Director of Product Management at Vonage chats about the impact of AI on modern contact centers in this interview with AiThority.com:

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Take us through the highlights of your AI journey so far.

Mine began in 2001 when the company I worked for bought a virtual assistant for the websites. It was very advanced for its time, and I would argue its NLP was powerful, but it was hard to author. Not too dissimilar to the challenges agentic faces! But it did answer 95% of questions on a major telecoms website and in Portuguese. I also used case-based reasoning a lot, and we competed with neural network companies for knowledge management solutions for contact center agents. Ten years ago, I worked for a company that offered sentiment analysis and the sentiment was linked with a topic. This is still a leading concept. With a team, we earned a patent for extracting sentiment and associated entities. I now work with solutions that are agentic-based and also offer real-time sentiment, auto summarization and disposition codes and knowledge, along with a virtual assistant. 

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How are you seeing AI impact the way contact centers function? Can you talk about how some brands are optimizing this capability to the full here?

Contact centers are undergoing quite a transformation as AI capabilities continue to evolve, especially focusing on more personalized, tailored interactions to analyze customer conversations. AI is streamlining customer service functions such as intelligent call-routing to analyze conversations and customer data to connect with the best agents, handles routine inquiries and escalates to humans only when needed, and provides contextual on-call assistance to suggest resources in real-time. The benefits that have resulted are tremendous, showing overall improved customer satisfaction, especially as 65% of consumers become frustrated by long wait times and multiple different contacts in customer service interactions. AI also plays a significant role in optimizing contact center agent staffing shortages and increases their productivity by lowering average handling time (AHT) up to 25%. Optimized staffing means reduced costs, as agents can handle more calls in less time. Predictive analytics can also forecast demand, making scheduling the right number of agents for peak periods easier. In addition, AI-driven conversation monitoring reviews every interaction for quality assurance, something no human team can realistically achieve. Contact center AI can automatically flag potential compliance risks and take proactive steps to help prevent costly regulatory fines.

Brands fully embracing and integrating AI capabilities into the contact center are doing far more than just automating simple tasks; they are using it as a growth engine across sales, service, and operations. Virtual assistants handle the transactional sales and onboarding, while real-time speech analytics during calls suggest next-best actions to close deals. We also see brands using AI to deliver more omnichannel support to reach new customers on the channels they use every day, like SMS, chat, phone, and social platforms, so sales leads can be tracked and nurtured with personalized follow-ups. Finally, an emerging AI trend more businesses are leaning into is embracing voice cloning to create synthetic voices that sound like a native speaker, allowing offshore agents to sound local, which improves brand image, personalizes customer interactions, and even reduces agent fatigue or frustration.

How can customer-facing teams use agentic AI tools to guide processes and conversations more effectively?

Agentic AI allows these teams to work a bit smarter and deliver more personalized interactions at every stage of the customer journey. Since this particular technology needs less hand-holding, it can interpret customer goals and make decisions simply based on context by detecting sentiment and intent. It can even recommend next steps, which helps teams resolve issues faster and more empathetically. With each customer interaction, agentic AI learns and adapts to improve understanding of customer behavior and preferences to adapt to new, future situations.

Thanks to agentic AI, AI-powered interactions are also beginning to sound more human. Conversations are feeling less scripted and a bit more natural to consumers, so they feel understood and supported. Also, in the future, multiple AI agents will be able to work together to manage and solve complex issues, so for customer-facing staff, this means a smoother process from the very first touchpoint to the resolution.

It should be noted that agentic AI is still in its infancy, so we haven’t yet seen the full potential of its benefits, especially in the contact center. However, we’re not that far away –  Gartner predicts that by 2028, one-third of enterprise software will include agentic AI, with around 15% of everyday business decisions made automatically by these systems. Organizations need to proceed with caution when implementing, as well as with any technology, as agentic AI can produce errors or bias if trained on outdated or skewed data. To work well, these systems need high-quality, diverse datasets, which can be especially challenging for smaller or new businesses with limited data to draw from.

In what ways can modern marketers and sales teams use AI to power retention and growth?

AI is deepening customer relationships, boosting retention, and fueling business growth at a time when competition for consumer attention is becoming tougher every day.  Encouragingly, consumers are also becoming more comfortable with AI in their retail and customer service experiences. In fact, my company found that a quarter of consumers are very likely to seek AI-assisted help in customer service situations, and another 25% are even comfortable with having AI handle complex or sensitive issues.

For marketers, AI opens doors to new engagement tools, from voice-activated shopping assistants to augmented reality (AR) try-ons, which help brands differentiate themselves and stay ahead of rising customer expectations. Also, when marketing teams are armed with predictive analytics, they can anticipate customer needs and segment audiences more precisely to rework campaigns in real time to provide more relevant customer outreach.

Both sales and marketing teams also gain a leg up by using AI to tailor their content with AI-powered personalization strategies. By analyzing a customer’s past purchase, AI can tailor things like email campaigns to text messages that ultimately turn into a sale. Generative AI can take this a step further by powering virtual assistants, social media, and messaging channels to deliver faster support, richer conversations, and tailored recommendations, resulting in greater impact on your revenue.

Five things about AI-powered tools that are still underutilized?

While AI tools are becoming more accessible, there are still a number of capabilities that aren’t being used to their full potential. Too often, organizations focus only on automation or personalization and miss out on features that can elevate customer and agent experiences. Here are five areas where this is happening in the contact center:

1. Language translation: With many brands operating globally, they might not be fully utilizing AI to provide multilingual support. Real-time translation across voice, chat, and messaging can help agents and even virtual assistants connect with customers in their preferred language without errors.
2. Compliance and quality assurance: AI can review 100% of conversations and flag compliance risks while spotting best-practice moments. Even though this technology is available, most still rely on manual sampling, missing opportunities to improve consistency, coach agents more effectively, and avoid regulatory fines.
3. Dynamic knowledge management: Static knowledge bases can be difficult to maintain, so AI can step in to automatically update and refine content from call transcripts, chat logs, and CRM data. If AI isn’t used here, it can leave agents without the most current or relevant information during customer interactions.
4. Fraud detection: With fraud-related attacks on the rise, AI’s ability to analyze behavioral patterns and detect anomalies is critical but often overlooked. Beyond just cost savings, smarter fraud prevention can build trust and strengthen long-term customer loyalty.
5. Augmented training and coaching:AI can stimulate realistic customer scenarios, adapt training difficulty as agents improve, and provide immediate feedback. While most businesses use AI to support customer conversations, fewer are taking advantage of its potential to continually develop and empower their frontline teams.

A few thoughts on the future of AI before we wrap up? 

Businesses need to decide where they will sit with the adoption of agentic AI. While we know it will make us more productive, we must consider the impact on the culture within a business in order to find the right balance between AI and the human touch. If you reduce staff due to agentic AI, do you risk losing customers? We know agentic can do much of the work of humans, but finding the right balance where AI can augment the human connection is key.

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