The customer service landscape is experiencing a seismic shift. Everywhere you look, AI agents are proliferating – AI-powered assistants promising to revolutionize how businesses interact with their customers. Yet for all the buzz and investment, many organizations find themselves grappling with the same fundamental challenges they’ve faced long before generative and agentic AI: fragmented experiences, unpredictable outcomes, and solutions that work well in isolation but fail to scale across the enterprise.
In a recent episode of the Punk CX podcast, I had the opportunity to sit down with industry CX advisor, Adrian Swinscoe to discuss how Pega is taking a fundamentally different approach to self-service and agentic AI. What emerged from our conversation was a vision that goes far beyond traditional “black-box” AI and chatbots – one that puts enterprise workflows at the heart of self-service.
The problem with today's "agent" explosion
As Adrian and I discussed, the current market is undeniably noisy. Organizations are investing heavily in AI-powered customer service tools, yet many are finding that these solutions create new problems even as they solve others. Traditional chatbots, while improved by recent AI advances, often remain siloed within single channels or restricted to proprietary interfaces. This creates fragmented customer experiences and forces development teams to rebuild logic and decisioning for each new touchpoint.
Perhaps even more concerning for enterprise organizations – particularly those in regulated industries – is the unpredictability that many current AI agents introduce. When an AI agent "goes rogue" or fails to follow established protocols, the brand impact can be significant. The question that keeps many executives awake at night is simple: How do you harness the power of agentic AI in the contact center while maintaining the governance, compliance, and consistency that customers demand?
A workflow-powered revolution
Our conversation revealed how Pega offers a fundamentally different approach that helps solve many of the challenges described above. Rather than building another chatbot or siloed AI agent, Pega combines decades of workflow automation expertise with the power of predictable AI to create contextual self-service that actually resolves issues. Here at Pega, self-service agents leverage the same enterprise workflows typically used by human customer service representatives. This provides guidance across the full customer journey.
This isn't just a technical distinction – it's a fundamental reimagining of what self-service can accomplish. These self-service agents can handle complex, multi-step processes that would typically require human intervention. Think beyond FAQ responses to scenarios like managing first notice of loss claims, guiding customers through complex billing inquiries, or dynamically adapting conversations based on customer responses while maintaining full context throughout lengthy interactions. This can be done autonomously without the need of a customer service representative (CSR), while also providing seamless handoffs to CSRs when needed.
Center-out agentic architecture for consistent experiences
The magic happens through Pega’s Center-out agentic architecture, which orchestrates service workflows from the enterprise core through semantic understanding. This ensures that regardless of the channel and whether a customer interacts with an AI agent or a human representative, they receive the same high-quality service with seamless transitions and full context preservation.
Unlike solutions that lock you into specific channels or interfaces, Pega Self-Service Agent works across voice (IVR), digital channels (web, mobile, messaging), third-party chat systems, and other platforms through semantic integration. This means organizations can deliver unified brand experience regardless of how customers choose to engage.
Through Pega Blueprint, new workflows can be created in minutes and deployed instantly into conversational self-service agents, reducing implementation time from weeks to days. For organizations looking to scale their self-service capabilities rapidly, this represents a game-changing acceleration in time-to-value.
Looking to the future
Perhaps the most thought-provoking part of our discussion was Adrian's question about where the customer service industry is headed. The transformation we're witnessing today goes beyond just adding AI to existing processes – it's fundamentally reshaping the contact center of the future. We're moving toward a future where many customer interactions, ranging from low to high complexity, will be completely self-served, with many handled proactively based on predictive AI and risk modeling.
In this future, channel distinctions become meaningless. The artificial boundaries we've created between email, chatbots, and voice systems will dissolve into a unified, intelligent service layer that adapts to customer needs regardless of how they choose to engage.
The journey starts now
As we discussed on the podcast, the key for organizations looking to embrace this future is to start now by picking one or two workflows that have automation potential – perhaps part of a claims process – and begin infusing predictable AI. These capabilities are available now through Pega Blueprint™, with full integration into Pega Customer Service™ coming in our Infinity '25 release this fall.
The conversation with Adrian reinforced something I've long hoped would be the future of customer service: That self-service won’t feel like self-service – it will feel like exceptional customer service, delivered at scale.
To hear the full conversation and dive deeper into these themes, listen to the complete Punk CX podcast episode. Adrian's insights and probing questions reveal additional nuances about the future of customer service that every CX leader should consider.