I’m sure most of us have experienced that frustrating moment at the grocery store. You pick up the store brand to save a few bucks, only to find out at checkout that the fancy, artisanal version was actually on sale for less. It’s a little letdown that makes you think about how often we might misjudge “cheaper options” in other parts of life too.

It seems AI agents are having a bit of that moment in customer service.

The standard pitch from tech providers has been wonderfully simple. A human agent is expensive. An AI agent can work around the clock, handle thousands of conversations, and never needs a lunch break or the Friday after Thanksgiving off. So, replacing people with AI must save money. Except, as the kids say (or my butchering of what they would say), the receipts don’t math.

Goldman Sachs recently compared the daily application programming interface costs of several AI agents with the cost of comparable human programmer labor. A coding agent came out at $13.39 per day, compared with around $300 for a human developer. That’s the kind of potential savings that makes CFOs the world over sit up and take notice. So, for now—save the craze for tokenmaxxing–the cost story for developers seems sound.

But the comparison for a contact center agent looked really quite different. Goldman Sachs estimated the daily AI cost at $92.90, slightly higher than the $90 cost of a human worker. That contact center number should make enterprises pause before they start planning any joint retirement party for their entire frontline workforce.

Voice AI is more expensive to run than many text-based applications. Those applications listen, interpret, reason, retrieve information, generate an answer, and turn that answer back into speech quickly enough that the customer doesn’t wonder whether the bot has wandered off to make coffee. But each of those steps adds computing cost. And then there’s the small matter of whether the interaction actually works.

A human agent costing $90 a day and an AI agent costing $92.90 aren’t interchangeable units. The human may understand a half-explained problem, catch the customer’s sarcasm, recognize that a policy doesn’t quite fit the situation, or realize that someone needs reassurance rather than another recital from the knowledge base.

Clearly, the AI may do some of those things too. Many of them do those things very well. But the point is that enterprises still have to measure the whole outcome. A slightly cheaper interaction isn’t much of a bargain if it creates repeat contacts, unnecessary escalations, lower satisfaction, or a customer who leaves the conversation wondering whether the company has ever met a human being.

Of course, the economics will change. Model prices keep moving. Voice technology is improving. More efficient architectures will bring costs down, even with a predicted rise in token costs. So look at that $92.90 figure as a snapshot, not some permanent law of nature.

Still, it’s a useful reality check. And here is where we get somewhat counterintuitive. In many contact centers, the strongest near-term use of AI may remain augmentation. AI can help employees find answers faster, summarize conversations, complete after-call work, and identify the next best action. That shift is already showing up in enterprise budgets. In our Opus Research brief, The CCaaS Rebalance: CX Software Spend in the Agentic Era, we project that agent assist, orchestration, analytics, and AI-native automation will capture a larger share of customer service software spending over the next two to three years. It can also give AI agents the context they need to resolve more issues without forcing customers to start over. But given today’s costs, brands may get more value by applying AI to harder problems, where it can help employees navigate complexity, coordinate across systems, and eliminate handoffs. That’s where augmentation can improve both productivity and the customer experience, rather than merely trimming a few seconds from routine work. The economics may also be more favorable over time because these complex interactions are usually handled by more experienced and more expensive employees, rather than the lowest-cost offshore or domestic Level 1 agents.

That approach won’t produce the most dramatic workforce-reduction script for a quarterly earnings call. It may produce something more valuable, though. Better service, more productive employees, and an automation strategy built around actual economics instead of the vague belief that anything with “AI” on the label must be cheaper.

Sometimes the store brand really is the bargain. And sometimes the fancy option costs less. The real lesson then is to compare prices before filling the cart.

Categories: Articles

Tags: customer care, Voice Self Service, Contact Center, agentic, AI agents, hybrid workforce