AI in the contact centre: what it can do and how to get started

Three ways AI helps

• Self-service: AI agents answer common questions by chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email and phone, and hand over to a human agent when needed.
• Agent assistance: an AI assistant suggests replies, summarises the case, translates and recommends the next step, right in the agent workspace.
• Insights: calls are transcribed, and analytics show which topics are growing, where bottlenecks occur and what could be solved with self-service.

What Mitel CX and Workflow Studio offer today

According to Mitel, these features are available today in the Mitel CX contact centre and the Mitel Workflow Studio automation tool:

Feature	Where it is available
AI agents with a no-code builder and an AI knowledge base	Mitel CX
AI assistant with suggested replies, summaries and translation	Mitel CX
Real-time call transcription	Mitel CX 3.0
Speech recognition and text-to-speech in IVR menus	Mitel CX, via Google
AI switchboard that understands what callers want	Mitel Workflow Studio
Generative AI in your own flows, with models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic	Mitel Workflow Studio

Several AI features are add-ons or subscriptions, and we help you choose the ones that are useful in your organisation.

How to get started

• Choose a well-defined area, such as the ten most common questions in one channel.
• Gather the knowledge the AI will base its answers on, and bring it up to date.
• Measure your baseline: volume, waiting time, first-contact resolution and after-call work time.
• Build and test in a test environment, using real questions from your customers.
• Go live on a small scale, with a clear route to a human.
• Review the results, improve the knowledge base and expand once the results hold up.

Humans stay in the loop

A good AI solution knows when to hand over. When an AI agent transfers a contact, the whole conversation goes with it, and in Mitel CX 3.0 the agent sees the AI agent’s transcript in Ignite as the call arrives. Customers should never have to start again, and they should never hit a dead end.

Data, GDPR and informing customers

Find out where data is processed, both in the platform and by the AI service in use, and make sure data processing agreements (DPAs) are in place. Tell customers when they are talking to an AI and when calls are transcribed or recorded. The EU AI Act requires that people talking to an AI agent are told so.

Common pitfalls

• A first step that is too broad, which makes it hard to measure and easy to lose momentum.
• A knowledge base that is not kept up to date.
• No clear route to a human.
• No measurements, so nobody knows whether things improved.
• Promising the percentages quoted in suppliers’ marketing instead of measuring for yourself.

Last updated 14 October 2026.