The Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) market is undergoing its most profound transformation since the initial migration from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. While the initial wave of CCaaS adoption was driven by IT modernisation and hardware end-of-life cycles, the current landscape is defined by the rise of agentic AI, changing customer expectations, and the necessity for deep, end-to-end operational integration.
In a recent interview during the Nice World event, Darren Rushworth, President, CX International, NiCE, outlined the company’s strategic vision and the unique realities facing Australian and New Zealand enterprises as they navigate the shift from legacy systems to hybrid, AI-orchestrated contact centres.
Moving to the hybrid human-AI contact centre
The transition to cloud contact centres established the infrastructure, but the next frontier lies in orchestrating interactions across a blended workforce. Rushworth comments, “I don’t think the world’s going to be black and white. It’s not going to be all human or all AI, it’s going to be a hybrid world we’re going to live in. So how can we make that as enterprise-ready, streamlined, and as integrated as possible? When you do simple, boring things like workforce management, scheduling, reporting, analytics, and quality control, how do you do that across both human and AI agents seamlessly?”
Following its acquisition of conversational and agentic AI provider Cognigy, NiCE is focussing its roadmap on bringing human agents and autonomous AI agents together within a unified ecosystem.
- The orchestration challenge: While deploying a standalone AI bot is straightforward, managing scheduling, workforce management (WFM), quality control, and cross-channel reporting across both human and AI agents introduces significant complexity.
- The hybrid reality: Rather than an “all-human” or “all-AI” model, enterprise contact centres are adopting a hybrid structure. Native integration ensures seamless handoffs between automated self-service and human-assisted interactions without fracturing the customer journey.
- Enterprise grade guardrails: Building AI in-house carries substantial cost risks such as spiralling Large Language Model (LLM) token fees, along with security and data exposure concerns. NiCE provides pre-built compliance, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and local data sovereignty guardrails out of the box.
Linking the front, mid, and back office
A critical limitation of traditional customer service is that agents often acknowledge a request without executing the underlying work in real time. NiCE’s roadmap is prioritising functional (or applied) AI, moving beyond informational Q&A bots to systems capable of executing transactional tasks directly within core enterprise platforms.
“Functional AI or applied AI is the ability to do real things,actually do stuff, not just help answer your service inquiry, but actually go away to backend systems, do physical updates, and solve your problem”, says Rushworth
ANZ vs. global AI adoption patterns
While Australia led the global market in moving contact centre infrastructure from on-premise hardware to the cloud, its approach to AI deployment exhibits distinct regional dynamics.
Rushworth observes, “When it came to adopting cloud contact centre solutions, Australia was a leader in the world. By our calculations, probably 70% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand are already cloud. With AI, it’s really interesting. There is a real hesitation here in Australia to trust AI.”
“At the moment, the majority of Australian organisations are grappling with: ‘Well, what does it really mean? I know I have to do something, I’m not really sure where to start, and I’m not sure about the risk.’ It’s a bit messy. You go across the pond to New Zealand, and they’re all in. They’re moving full steam ahead with agentic AI. as they are in North America and the UK, because they see it as a competitive advantage.”
- Australia (cautious & risk-averse): Driven by concerns over data privacy, regulatory scrutiny, and high-profile corporate missteps, Australian enterprises are taking a cautious approach. Interest is high, but procurement requires proven use cases and low-risk implementation paths.
- New Zealand & North America (rapid deployment): New Zealand businesses are aggressively adopting agentic AI across customer service touchpoints, viewing automation as a direct competitive advantage to scale service delivery quickly.
- Data sovereignty as a prerequisite: Across both Australia and New Zealand, local data hosting is critical—particularly within government, financial services, and healthcare sectors.
TCO, labour constraints, and productivity
The financial rationale for CCaaS migration was primarily an infrastructure play (converting capital expenditure on physical servers to operating expenditure). Conversely, according to Rushworth AI investment is a business productivity play, driven by persistent labor shortages, wage pressures, and escalating interaction volumes. “The move to cloud was an infrastructure play. This is a business play, this is not an IT play. Even though IT says they want to build their own bots, you’ve got to have business consultants talking to business people about how we drive value out of AI.”
Faced with rising call volumes and constrained hiring budgets, enterprises risk ballooning queue times. Applying AI to high-volume, low-complexity interactions preserves human agent capacity for complex, high-value inquiries.”We are seeing higher customer satisfaction from people talking to AI than talking to humans. If I say you’re going to talk to a human but you’ve got to wait 20 minutes, or an AI can solve your problem now, you’ll go for AI every single time.”
When AI agents provide immediate resolution without hold times, user satisfaction metrics frequently surpass those of traditional channels. Nice reports that deployed agentic AI implementations achieve up to a 96% recommendation rate among end users.
The next evolution of contact centre technology across Australia and New Zealand is no longer about simply shifting infrastructure to the cloud; it is about driving tangible business value. However, while interest across ANZ is soaring, Australian organisations are taking a notably more cautious approach to adoption than their international peers.