If you lead customer service, sales or IT, you are probably fielding two questions at once: where should AI do real work in our customer conversations, and are we spending enough to keep up? Vendors promise that AI agents, copilots and analytics will fix everything, while budgets stay tight and boards want proof. The AI Imperative in Business Communications from Metrigy answers with evidence: what organizations are actually doing with contact center AI, what results they report, and how their investment compares with yours.
It's a short, data-rich research report written for business, CX and IT leaders who need to build a business case, set priorities for the next budget cycle, or simply check their plans against what peers are doing.
What contact center AI is delivering for real organizations
The findings come from Metrigy's AI for Business Success: 2025-26 global study of more than 1,100 organizations, supported by a separate survey of consumers in North America. That pairing matters. You see the business view and the customer view side by side, so you can judge whether your AI plans match what the people on the other end of the line actually want.
The report opens with the average measurable gains companies attribute to AI, covering revenue, operating costs, customer satisfaction, efficiency and after-call work. It then shows how IT and CX leaders rank the value of AI: helping people work more productively, automating functions outright, or producing insight. If you're deciding whether to start with automation or with assistance, that ranking gives you a useful reference point.
Agentic AI, agent assist and virtual receptionists explained
Much of the current buzz is about agentic AI, and the report gives you a clear way to think about it. It explains how agentic AI differs from task-specific AI, with a side-by-side comparison of autonomy, context awareness, learning, reasoning and flexibility, plus the pros and cons of each approach. You'll also see how many companies have actually adopted agentic AI, which approach they find more valuable today, and how the most successful AI adopters answer that question differently from everyone else.
From there, the report looks at the specific tools that are changing day-to-day operations. After reading it, you'll be able to:
- See how companies apply agent assist and copilots during live conversations, and which business metrics improve as a result
- Understand what an AI virtual receptionist can handle without a person answering the phone, and how far companies are going in reducing human involvement across support tiers
- Gauge how much time AI gives back to supervisors and where they are reinvesting it
- Identify which roles, from sales leaders to product managers, can put conversation intelligence to work
The section on conversation intelligence also shows how highly leaders now rate customer interaction data compared with every other data source they have, and whether they think it belongs on executive dashboards. If you've struggled to get leadership attention for interaction analytics, those findings will help.
AI spending benchmarks and what customers now expect
Budget is where many AI plans stall, so the spending data may be the most practical part of the report. It sets out how fast companies are increasing AI investment this year and next, what the average organization spends on AI technology per employee, and how spending at the highest-performing companies compares with the rest. It also identifies which industries spend the most, which spend the least, and which are growing their AI budgets fastest. Those are the numbers you'll want in hand when you defend or challenge your own budget.
On the customer side, the report tracks how consumer attitudes toward AI have shifted over the past year. You'll see which AI-driven benefits customers value most, how they rate recent improvements when dealing with AI agents by text or voice, and how quickly their own use of generative AI is growing. Taken together, these findings make a strong case that customers are more ready for AI-powered service than many companies assume.
The report closes with Metrigy's recommendations for leaders, covering AI agents, live agent assistance, agentic workflows, virtual receptionists, conversation intelligence, Voice of the Customer programs and investment levels. Each one is short and practical, written for people who have to turn strategy into a plan.
Download Metrigy's research on AI in business communications
Get the full report to see the complete benchmark data: the measured business benefits of AI, the agentic versus task-specific comparison, adoption and results for agent assist, virtual receptionists and conversation intelligence, per-employee AI spending by success group and industry, and Metrigy's recommendations for what to do next. Fill out the form to download your copy and bring real numbers to your next AI planning conversation.