How to Help Your Team Thrive in an AI World

We can’t deny that AI is reshaping contact centres. Yet there is still a place for humans – real people – that need guidance and reassurance from their leaders to help them navigate this changing landscape with confidence.

That’s why we asked our consultants panel for their best tips and strategies on how you can bring your team along for the ride, giving them the resilience and skills they need to truly thrive as the workforce of the future.

Practise Positive Vulnerability So You Can All Learn Together

Garry Gormley, Founder of FAB Solutions — Garry Gormley

Practise positive vulnerability! We don’t have all the answers when it comes to how AI, automation, and technology is going to change how we operate.

We may even be learning at the same time as our team. And yes, this may make you feel uncomfortable, as your greater knowledge can be seen as one of your strengths, but your job as a leader is to lead people through the change!

So, get them to be curiously engaged and help them “let go” of the old ways of working and embrace the new – but be mindful that you can only do this if you show that “it’s ok not to be ok” whilst you all embrace new ways of working.

Contributed by: Garry Gormley, Founder of FAB Solutions

Always Talk About AI With a Growth Mindset – So Your People Are More Willing to Learn

Jon Edwards, Managing Director at The Lion Consultancy Ltd. — Jon Edwards

The biggest shift in the changing role of the human advisor isn’t the technology itself; it’s the mindset of the leaders introducing it!

If leaders talk about AI with a growth mindset and focus on adaptability, that attitude quickly spreads through the team.

People become more open, more curious, and more willing to learn. That culture becomes infectious. The opposite is also true. If AI is introduced with uncertainty, poor communication, or unspoken fear around “being replaced”, that fear spreads just as fast.

Agile leaders are clear that AI is a tool, not a threat. Its role is to support advisors, not remove them. Practical use cases matter here.

Using AI to offer hints and tips on de-escalating an angry customer, structuring a written response, or guiding next steps all help advisors feel more confident – especially in challenging interactions. And that confidence is what ultimately improves performance and customer experience!

Contributed by: Jon Edwards, Managing Director at The Lion Consultancy Ltd.

Show Real Empathy Towards “Replacement Fear”

Edward Durbin, Senior Vice President, explic8 — Edward Durbin

Changing collective mindsets requires leaders to elevate and double down on the uniquely human capabilities that technology cannot replicate.

AI excels at speed, scale, and pattern recognition. Human advisors excel at judgement, empathy, and accountability. When combined intentionally, this partnership creates better outcomes for customers navigating complex decisions.

While all of this may be true, it can come across as academic or “corporate speak” to vulnerable employees. Leaders should show real empathy and that they understand why the replacement fear exists and they need to affirm that similar human empathy is required to address issues, concerns, or fears that customers may have.

Contributed by: Edward Durbin, Senior Vice President, explic8

Treat Your Team as System Sensors – Not Just Service Agents

Michael Clark, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant of CXTT Consulting — Michael Clark

Many organizations are using AI to make broken systems easier to live with, not better. Early AI investment is concentrated on hiding effort and work.

Deflecting demand, summarizing interactions, speeding up after-call work, and automating workflows – without redesigning them – may improve metrics, but they do not remove the root causes of demand.

They push complexity downstream until it lands with the human advisor. That is changing the advisor’s role in a critical way, as human advisors now sit at the fault lines of the system.

They can see where automation fails, where policy conflicts with reality, and where poor design creates repeat demand.

This makes them uniquely positioned to help fix the system – if leaders let them! But, to do that, 3 key shifts are required:

Treat advisors as system sensors as well as service agents – Advisors should be trained and expected to identify patterns in failure, friction, and unnecessary demand. Short feedback loops, tagged failure reasons, and structured call debriefs turn lived experience into design insight.
Legitimize judgement, not just empathy – Advisors must be trusted to override scripts, challenge automated decisions, and resolve issues at the source. What I am seeing is that when every exception is escalated, dysfunction is preserved rather than corrected.
Close the loop between insight and design – Agility breaks when advisor insights are shared but disappear into dashboards, not process and technology backlogs. Real agility exists when tech, product, and process teams act on what advisors surface, and visibly remove work from the system.

Contributed by: Michael Clark, Co-Founder and Principal Consultant of CXTT Consulting

Treat Early Failures as Data (Rather Than Deficits) to Maintain Psychological Safety

Danny Wareham, Certified Business Psychologist and coach — Danny Wareham

Most teams don’t struggle to adapt because they lack capability or clarity around processes. They struggle because adaptation carries social risk!

Agility asks people to experiment, to revise opinions in public, and to admit what they don’t yet know.

For human advisors, whose credibility has traditionally been built on expertise and confidence, this can feel threatening. As a result, resistance to change is often less about technology and more about identity.

One way to understand this hesitation is through David Rock’s SCARF model[1], which highlights how social threats are processed in the brain as strongly as physical ones[2]. Agile behaviours often trigger threats to Status (appearing less competent) and Certainty (moving without clear answers).

In contact centres, where performance is visible and metrics are closely tracked, these threats are amplified. What looks like resistance is often a self-protective response to perceived social loss.

This is where leadership matters most. Agile teams are not created through encouragement alone, but through the social conditions leaders establish.

When leaders model curiosity over certainty, reward questions as much as outcomes, and treat early failures as data rather than deficits, they make adaptation psychologically safe.

In practice, this means deliberately designing interactions where learning is visible but safe. These interactions should celebrate curiosity and normalize adjustment as part of the work itself. Leaders who do so transform social risk into collective confidence, allowing true agility to flourish.

References:

[1] Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1(1), 1–9.

[2] Lieberman, M. D., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2009). Social cognition and the brain: A system for understanding others. In K. Ochsner & S. Kosslyn (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Cognitive Neuroscience (pp. 136–157). Oxford University Press.

Contributed by: Danny Wareham, Founder & Director of Firgun

Practise ‘Hand-Off’ Moments for When AI Gets It Wrong

Rob Clarke

Agility isn’t a project plan! It’s how your team learns in real time!

Here are a few good habits that can help:

Practise ‘hand-off’ moments – When AI gets it wrong (and it will/does), advisors need a clean recovery line and a calm reset. That’s a skill you can practise!
Run weekly ‘what changed?’ huddles – 10 minutes. What’s new in policy, process, demand, or customer mood? What are we doing differently this week?
Coach for intent, not scripts – Before feedback, ask: ‘What was your intent there?’ If the intent is to help, you’ll hear better questions, better listening, less ‘fixing’.
Treat knowledge as a ‘team sport’ – If one person hoards the ‘how-to’, the team becomes fragile. Create quick mechanisms for capturing what works and updating the source of truth.
Build an ‘augmented human’ mindset – AI is the co-pilot. The advisor is still responsible for the outcome. That one idea changes how people show up.

After all, if leaders want an agile team, they have to lead like it too!

Contributed by: Rob Clarke, Director and Co-Founder of Elev-8 Performance

Keep Asking “What If?” So You Can Always Be Great Out There

Bill Quiseng, Chief Experience Officer at billquiseng — Bill Quiseng

If at first you don’t succeed, innovate until you do! Exceeding current customer needs and anticipating future customer wants will maximize the ROI of CX.

So, always ask, “What happened?” AND “What if?”, so you can always be GREAT out there!

Contributed by: Bill Quiseng, Chief Experience Officer at billquiseng.com

★★★★★