Why Pega Is Ditching Token Costs and Betting on Business Outcomes Instead

Why Pega Is Ditching Token Costs and Betting on Business Outcomes Instead

The Director of Pega's AI Lab breaks down the real mechanics behind agentic marketing operations and why "magical thinking" is killing AI projects before they start.  In this CX Today discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Peter van der Putten, Director of the AI Lab and Lead Scientist at Pegasystems.  With agentic AI dominating the conversation across the CX space, Peter cuts through the noise to explain what it actually takes to make it work in enterprise marketing, and why orchestration, not individual agent capability, is the real differentiator.  If you're trying to separate genuine AI progress from hype, this one's worth your time.  Agentic AI is everywhere right now, but most of the conversation stays frustratingly shallow.  Peter van der Putten goes deeper, explaining how Pega's newly launched Customer Engagement Studio works alongside Customer Decision Hub to give marketers a governed, agent-powered path from brief to live campaign in minutes.  Outcome-based pricing: Pega is making a bold move away from token-based costs, betting they can tie agentic AI tightly enough to business outcomes to charge on results instead.  Left brain meets right brain: Peter explains how CDH has handled analytical decisioning for over 30 years, with Wells Fargo running 6 billion next best actions a month through it, and how Customer Engagement Studio layers in generative and agentic AI to solve the content and marketing ops bottleneck, not the decisioning one.  How the agents actually work together: A conversational agent orchestrates specialized agents across marketing strategy, creative, data science, compliance, and performance, each with a defined role, none operating in a silo.  Why 40% of agentic AI projects fail: Peter points to "magical thinking", the assumption that throwing agents at a problem will sort itself out. The fix is embedding agents into real workflows tied to measurable business and customer outcomes.

Stop Letting Your AI Agents Off the Hook

Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, is joined by Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, for a candid conversation about what it actually means to run a contact center where humans and AI agents work side by side As agentic AI takes on a growing share of customer interactions, Dave makes the case that the standards we apply to human agents must apply equally to AI, and that the organizations skipping that step are already storing up problems. Honest, specific, and refreshingly free of hype. The hybrid contact center isn't a future concept, it's the reality most operations leaders are already navigating. Dave Rennyson breaks down what it takes to manage it properly. AI agents are handling the simpler conversations, which means human agents are increasingly left with the harder, more complex ones. Dave argues this demands more recognition and support for human agents, not less. Quality management for AI agents is non-negotiable. Treating AI like a self-regulating system is, in Dave's words, like letting your builder do his own home inspections. Third-party QM, whether manual or automated, has to sit on top. CSAT isn't dead, it's due a rebirth. Dave makes the case for using AI to score every conversation on a normalized scale, cutting through the "haters and lovers" bias that has always made survey data unreliable. "Good" in a hybrid contact center means managing the whole. Dave's vision is workforce decisions made minute-to-minute, based on task complexity, live performance data, and force-to-load, with humans and AI operating as a unified system.

Contact Centre AI Is Only as Good as the Data Behind It – So Why Are We Ignoring the Data?

Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, to tackle one of the most pressing yet underexplored challenges in modern contact center operations: what it actually takes to build an AI-ready data foundation. As AI agents become a fixture of the contact center, Dave makes a compelling case that the real risk isn't the technology, it's the lack of governance, measurement, and rigor underneath it. If your organization is deploying AI without asking how you'll manage it, this is essential viewing.As contact centers race to deploy AI, most are skipping the hard work that makes it sustainable. Dave Rennyson pulls no punches on what's going wrong and what leaders need to do differently. AI agents actually produce more data than human agents, including failure signals and turn-taking data that human conversations never generate. The opportunity is significant, but only if you have the architecture to capture and act on it. "Ground truth" is the step almost everyone skips. Dave breaks down what it means to establish a reliable baseline for AI performance, why it demands real scientific rigor, and what model drift looks like when you ignore it. Agentic AI is genuinely different from legacy IVR. The removal of linear flow constraints opens up a new design space, but only if organizations build the right orchestration and monitoring layers on top. Rather than declaring surveys dead, Dave argues that generative AI can now appraise every single conversation at scale, turning a historically biased metric into something far more powerful. For more Customer Experience tech news visit CX Today [https://www.cxtoday.com].

From Conversation to Case Action: Automating ServiceNow Workflows from Live Voice with Vonage

Rob Wilkinson speaks with Jonathan Kershaw, Director of Product Management at Vonage, about how live voice can bring real-time voice transcription and context directly into ServiceNow to trigger workflows during the call, not after it. Kershaw explains where the pain shows up most clearly: agents toggling between up to nine systems, inconsistent case notes, delayed case creation, and AI outcomes that fall short because they are missing the most important customer context. He shares practical scenarios, from IT outages to payment and fraud-related calls, showing how native voice in ServiceNow can support intent-based routing, mid-call escalations, warm handoffs powered by AI summaries, and faster wrap-up with automated dispositions. The conversation also covers what to automate first, how to prove ROI using credible baselines, and which KPIs tend to move earliest, including average handle time, after-call work, data quality, and reductions in follow-up contacts. The core message is straightforward: treat AI like any other business tool. Start with measurable operational gains, then scale. For more Customer Experience tech news visit CX Today [https://www.cxtoday.com].

Tool Overload is Killing Your Contact Center from the Inside Out

Mitel’s Stuart Aldridge discusses why the gap between what IT thinks it's delivering and what agents actually experience is quietly destroying customer service quality. In this CX Today discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Stuart Aldridge, Head of UK, Ireland & South Africa at Mitel, to dig into the findings of Mitel's State of Workforce Communication in the AI Era report.  With contact center agents juggling upwards of 12 tools on a single call while still being pressured to deliver exceptional customer experiences, the cracks in enterprise communication strategy are getting harder to ignore.  If you work in CX leadership, this one hits close to home.  Mitel's latest research surveyed over 2,000 IT decision-makers, desk workers, and frontline workers across the UK, US, Canada, Germany, and France, and the results are uncomfortable reading for anyone responsible for agent experience or customer outcomes.  The perception gap is enormous: 81% of IT leaders believe they're listening to user needs and delivering accordingly. Only 28% of frontline workers agree, and in healthcare that number drops to 17%.  Tool overload is the real villain: Agents are routinely navigating 10-14 applications on a live call, and 61% of workers say switching between tools is actively costing them productivity every single day.  Shadow IT is a symptom, not the problem: 76% of workers admit to using non-approved tools, not to break the rules, but because those tools are simply easier. The compliance and data risk that creates in a contact center environment is significant.  Consultative selling has gone missing: Stuart argues that vendors and resellers are too focused on closing deals and not nearly enough time sitting with the "Carols" of the world, the actual end users, to understand what they genuinely need before adding yet another layer to an already overwhelming stack.