TEXAS, UNITED STATES – Wayne Kay, the Regional VP of Sales Leadership EMEA at TTEC Digital, informed fellow CX leaders about the increasing incidents of AI customers calling on behalf of real customers and the reality that we in the contact center industry have no idea what to do about it.
Human-Centered Systems Expose Obvious Cracks
Contact center systems are built on human behavior, memory, and communication patterns. And this situation highlights the companies’ lack of capability to handle AI-based interactions.
- Knowledge-based authentication (KBA) fails because AI has database access to the account holder’s personal information.
- Fraud detection tools like voice biometrics and synthetic speech detection systems “may reject the interaction [with AI] entirely.”
- Interactive voice response (IVR) systems, which analyze human speech patterns, may flag the call as scripted fraud.
- KPIs and analytics become unreliable because “you can’t reliably identify which interactions involve humans.”
- Empathy-driven workflows become inefficient.
Kay’s Framework for AI Customer Readiness
Kay emphasizes that AI customer readiness should be on every CX leader’s agenda in the first quarter of 2026. To “treat every inbound call as potentially coming from an automated autonomous agent, not a human.”
He proposes three priorities to make this happen:
- Move from KBA questions to token-based, cryptographic authentication protocols to ensure the AI agent only has access to information the account holder permits.
- Audit the contact center’s knowledge systems to assess which of their information the AI agent receives.
- Redesign their workflows, building two lanes to cater to human customers and AI customers.
He also encourages them to start drafting policy on this and to establish a sandbox where they’ll “assemble cross-function teams—operations, IT, security, compliance—and war-game the scenario.”
