Call centre agents show graduates the correct Al way

Call centres are embracing artificial intelligence to boost their workers' output. By Lindsey Schutters

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centre player. “It should multiply your output. It should not be your output.”

That’s the “human-in-the-loop” philosophy CCI runs on. His local colleague, Cobus Pretorius, explains that although generative AI models are exciting, they're simply not robust enough for the messy reality of serving global clients across dozens of platforms.

“You can’t just plug an AI into an airline account that has 27 different systems and expect it to work. It'll break very quickly,” Cobus says.

“Most of our calls are high-emotion, high-complexity,” Mervyn adds. “That's where humans matter most.”

Cobus adds that, far from cutting jobs, AI has been a “net contributor” so far. “It’s creating demand for prompt engineers, reviewers, people building dashboards. We're training for roles that don’t even exist yet.”