European Contact Centre Leaders Are Unanimous on AI Workforce Future
The vast majority of European contact centre leaders state that they don’t expect their human advisors to ever be completely replaced by automated services and artificial intelligence.
The European Contact Centre Alliance (ECCA) hosted the webinar Building the Contact Centre Workforce for Tomorrow on 16 September 2025.
Over 300 leaders registered for the webinar, with live attendees asked to submit their views on whether automation and agentic AI ‘would ever replace the need for humans in the contact centre’.
80% responded unanimously with ‘No – it will never happen’, when presented with the question via an in-webinar poll.
16% responded with ‘Yes – but not sure when’, while just 4% believed it would happen within the next 5 years. No attendees responded with ‘yes – within 2 years’.
Augmented Future
The webinar, in partnership with Zoom and led by ECCA chair, Leigh Hopwood, was a chance to gain insights from European leaders on what the future looks like for their contact centres, alongside the workforce trends they’re seeing and the new roles and skills they’re training for.
Sophie Chelmick, Head of EMEA Footprint at TDCX was a panellist for the event, and said major changes were already underway in many contact centres.
“We’re already witnessing a profound shift in the nature of frontline interactions,” she said. “Our human teams are increasingly handling complex and often sensitive conversations. As AI-driven technologies continue to advance, we expect them to take on more of the cognitive load, freeing up our reps to focus on high-value, relational, and judgement-based work.”
“Our teams are evolving into true brand ambassadors – key to customer loyalty and brand differentiation. As a result, we anticipate a growing demand for skills in nuance, empathy, complexity and digital dexterity. The future of customer experience is all about high-value, multi-skilled interactions.”
Patrycja Sobera, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Workplace Solutions at global technology provider Unisys, was also a panellist for the event, and said she expected the future workforce to be augmented, adding that there are five core skills areas her organisation’s contact centre was working towards.
“Firstly, we are preparing our agents to be future-ready,” Sobera said. “Readiness around agentic AI and how these systems operate and interact with them effectively is vital. Crafting prompts and knowing when to overwrite and escalate.
“Then we train for good judgment. As we see AI and AI agents progress, human advisors will likely shift into intervention roles and as the human in the loop.
“Next there’s digital dexterity – the aptitude to be able to work across different channels and to switch from AI to virtual agents and to other channels. Then there’s building data literacy and understanding data privacy, and finally co-creation – training staff to be co-creators in the iterative improvement of the AIs we’ll possibly be using in the future.”
This approach, in which current contact centre employees were being upskilled or diversifying and transferring their skills for new emerging roles, was also a reality for over half of attendees, who were asked to describe how their ‘contact centre structure was evolving’ in a second poll within the online webinar.
56% responded with ‘a mix based on skills’, while 31% said ‘current advisors are taking new emerging roles’ or ‘colleagues from outside the contact centre are taking new roles’. Just 5% were recruiting new people into these emerging roles.
Empowerment and Ethics
Chelmick and Sobera were joined on the webinar by fellow panellists Michael Sherwood, Director Customer Onboarding & Assist at Worldpay, and James Adamczuk, Global CX Strategy Lead at Zoom.
Zoom’s Amamczuk highlighted that technology developments in the consumer space – such as Apple’s latest Airpods which come with live translation capabilities – are having a clear impact on how customer interactions are evolving in the contact centre.
However, he argued that successful future tech implementation hinged on contact centres “being empowered to train teams on the ethical use of AI, leverage knowledge and do something valuable and meaningful with it”.
And WorldPay’s Michael Sherwood added that the way consumers have historically interacted with automation and self-service tools within customer contact environments provides a clear path for how he expects customers to interact with AI in the future.
“When we think about the future of work, it’s a certainty that automation will increase substantially, facilitated by the growth in AI.” he said. “In future, should an automated journey fail be it for an internal employee trying to solve a problem or an external customer needing help, the need for a human to resolve their problem will become even more important.
“A premiumisation of service will take place, and the voice channel will be at its fore driven by highly skilled human agents that can navigate the complexities of a substandard automated experience.
“When it comes to resolving complex and emotional queries, a human agent will always have a starring role to play, supported by an AI toolkit that reduces cognitive load that can be spent creating emotional connections and building brand loyalty.”
Watch the ECCA webinar Building the Contact Centre Workforce for Tomorrow on-demand here.