Enterprises are pushing artificial intelligence deeper into customer service operations, including live interactions where voice, context, and human judgment present greater challenges for automation.
A partnership announced in June between shopping assistant and customer support firm Crescendo and digital transformation services company Alorica targets that challenge: moving AI beyond simple self-service into more complex live customer interactions. The companies plan to co-develop offerings for enterprise voice, chat, and other live CX channels.
Contact centers have traditionally measured automation in part by how effectively it reduces interactions requiring human agents. Generative and agentic AI are creating an opportunity to focus instead on resolution and how effectively automated and human support work together.
Crescendo is taking a different approach from vendors that add AI capabilities to existing CX systems. Its platform is designed to bring AI automation, customer data, analytics, and human support into a unified system.
Crescendo CEO Andy Lee argues that getting more value from AI will require enterprises to rethink the underlying architecture of their customer experience operations. Fragmented legacy CX systems, he contends, can make it difficult for AI applications to share customer context and coordinate work across channels.
"The future of customer experience won't be built through incremental upgrades to legacy platforms," he told CRM Buyer. "Organizations need a fundamentally different operating model. Crescendo has built that foundation."
Leadership Changes as Partnership Takes Shape
The partnership also coincides with a leadership change at Crescendo. Matt Price, who co-founded the company in January 2024 and served as CEO, recently moved into a strategic advisory role with the board of directors. Price said enterprises are under growing pressure to demonstrate returns from AI investments without adding more complexity to their CX operations.
"Alorica's mastery of live-channel CX, where context and human judgment matter most, combined with our AI-native architecture, gives enterprises a single platform where AI and humans work as one. This is what happens when AI stops being a project and becomes the way CX actually runs," Price said.
Alorica Co-CEO Max Schwendner said the partnership is intended to more closely integrate human agents and AI, not only in customer interactions but also in how CX operations are planned and managed.
"Brands that will lead are those that treat AI not as an add-on, but as the operating foundation of how CX is run," he said.
Inside Crescendo's AI-Native Approach
Crescendo's platform combines customer-facing AI with workforce management, quality assurance, analytics, and performance monitoring rather than operating those functions through separate systems.
The company says its technology powers more than 500 AI deployments worldwide. Lee said traditional contact-center strategies have emphasized reducing the number of interactions requiring human service.
That emphasis can make deflection a measure of success even when a customer's problem remains unresolved, Lee argued. For customers, he said, resolution matters more than whether a human agent handled the interaction.
"AI changes the equation because it allows us to optimize for resolution instead of containment. An AI-native platform understands context across every interaction, continuously learns from every outcome, and helps customers move forward instead of navigating disconnected systems," he said.
Lee sees that distinction between containment and resolution as central to how enterprises should evaluate AI-enabled customer service.
How AI-Native Platforms Are Different
Many established CRM and CX platforms are adding generative AI capabilities to architectures that predate the technology. Lee argues that this approach can create limitations when enterprises try to deploy AI across complex, real-time interactions such as voice and chat.
"The limiting factor, in my experience, is the architecture underneath the AI model. When AI sits on top of fragmented systems, it naturally inherits fragmented data, workflows, and accountability," Lee said.
Crescendo's platform is designed to share information from customer interactions across channels rather than isolate it within individual applications.
"That's the difference between using AI to make an old system a little smarter and building a customer experience system that can actually learn and improve as it operates," he said.
Bringing AI and Human Agents Together
The partnership combines Crescendo's AI technology with Alorica's global workforce of more than 100,000 agents. The goal is to allow automated systems and human agents to operate with access to the same customer context.
The emphasis on combining AI with human agents reflects a broader trend in customer service operations. A Gartner survey of 321 customer service and support leaders worldwide, conducted in September and October 2025, found that 85% were expanding human-agent responsibilities as AI reduces contact volume and shifts work toward higher-value tasks.
Customer service leaders are more likely to expand or change agent roles than eliminate them as AI adoption grows. (Source: Gartner)
Lee said the industry's focus on AI replacing human agents can obscure a more immediate operational problem: ensuring that automated systems and employees have access to the same customer information.
Automation and frontline operations often run on separate systems, Lee said. When an interaction moves between them, context can be lost, forcing customers to repeat information and making it harder to maintain a complete view of the customer journey. Crescendo's approach is designed to maintain that continuity between automated and human interactions.
Making Live Customer Engagement Work
Voice and live chat present particular automation challenges because context, tone, and human judgment can affect how an interaction should proceed. Crescendo is designed to preserve information from earlier exchanges when an interaction moves between an AI system and an Alorica representative.
"Context becomes fragmented across channels. Chat captures one part of the customer journey, voice captures another, and each new interaction often begins with no awareness of what has already happened," he said.
The platform is designed to retain customer intent, conversation history, previous actions, and unresolved issues across channels so each interaction can pick up where the previous one ended.
Lee said that continuity can reduce customer repetition and resolution times while giving human agents and AI systems access to the same information.
Turning Customer Service Into a Revenue Opportunity
Better use of customer context could also expand the role of contact centers beyond support and cost containment. Lee sees potential to use information gathered during support interactions to identify sales, retention, and expansion opportunities.
Customer service interactions generate information about customer needs, product problems, and potential reasons for churn. Lee said AI can connect that information across interactions to help determine an appropriate next action.
That could include recommending a different product, addressing an issue before it leads to churn, or identifying an unmet need. In Lee's view, the revenue opportunity comes from making those recommendations relevant to the customer's situation.
"When companies resolve the immediate issue and understand what the customer needs next, service strengthens loyalty and creates new growth opportunities," he said.
As enterprises move from AI pilots to broader deployments, architecture and integration become increasingly important, Lee argued. Fragmented data, disconnected systems, and limitations in real-time decision-making can become more consequential at scale.
Lee expects customer experience to become an important test of whether enterprises can translate AI investments into measurable operational results.
"Companies that build the right foundation now will move faster, operate more consistently, and deliver experiences that continue to improve," he said.
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