Most CX leaders think they know where AI lives in their contact center. They're wrong.
It's tucked inside your QA platform. It's in your WFM tool. It arrived quietly with that last vendor upgrade nobody fully scoped. And all of it falls under new compliance requirements of the EU AI Act.
August 2 marks the next step in the EU AI Act implementation. It’s a wake-up call for CX leaders to be compliant and set up their organizations for AI adoption at scale.
In this excerpt of a recent LinkedIn Live event, Wayne Kay of TTEC Digital talks to Amanda Panks of TTEC Digital and Georgi Georgiev of TTEC about why the EU AI Act matters to everyone, and what to do to get ready.
Want to learn more? Watch the full video here.
Transcript:
Liz Glagowski: Hi everyone and welcome to the CX pod. Does August 2nd mean anything to you? If you operate in the European Union, it should. It’s the date that the next round of the EU AI Act legislation goes into effect. If your contact center serves European customers or operates in European markets, these requirements may apply to you, whether you’re based in the EU, the UK, or anywhere around the world.
In this episode of the CX pod, we’re exploring what the EU AI Act means for customer experience leaders.
Today’s conversation is an excerpt of the recent LinkedIn Live hosted by TTEC Digital’s Wayne Kay. He speaks with Amanda Panks, a leading consultant at TTEC Digital, and Georgi Georgiev, senior corporate counsel at TTEC EMEA. They discuss how leading organizations are preparing for the new requirements and what to do first.
You’ll also hear practical advice for organizations that are just beginning their compliance journey. Amanda shares a surprisingly simple first step — make a list.
So let’s join Wayne, Amanda, and Georgie as they unpack the challenges, opportunities, and lessons CX leaders need to know as the EU AI Act moves from discussion to reality.
Wayne Kay: So Amanda, as a member of TTEC Digital strategy and operations consulting team, across the clients that you’re working with today, how visible is AI really within the contact center, and do most organizations actually know where AI is influencing decisions?
Amanda Panks: And I think it’s less visible than leaders would like to think that it is, and I think part of that is driven from the fact that they’ve not necessarily gone out and bought AI. They’ve not gone out and understood what it does, where it would sit, how it works, how we interact with it, um, and quite a lot of the time it’s being driven by the fact that it might come from avenues that they least expect, so maybe it’s an upgrade to a current platform, it lives in tools like QA and WFM tools, so it’s arriving into businesses from different avenues and I think that’s why it’s not quite as visible as it needs to be for leaders currently today.
Wayne Kay: That’s great, thank you. So considering that Amanda, CX leaders and their position on AI governance, what are the most common questions or concerns that you’re hearing from the CX industry right now around AI governance and risk?
Amanda Panks: Yeah, hearing a lot about accountability, so who’s who’s legally responsible, who’s financially responsible, who’s operationally responsible um for those outcomes that are coming from the AI um I hear quite a lot of questions around governance, so. Who’s going to be running that, who’s accountable for it, leading to the previous point, but also what should that governance look like, what could it look like? How are we going to embed that, so there’s a number of questions around that that I’m hearing.
I also hear a few questions around hallucination, uh, which are quite a common question that you would expect to hear, but predominantly it accountability is, is the one that keeps coming back time and again, uh, and quite rightly it’s at the forefront of people’s minds as it should be.
Wayne Kay: So if a client asks you where do we start with the EU AI Act readiness, what would be the first practical, practical step you’d advise?
Amanda Panks: Uh, make a list or an inventory of what you’ve got, because until you know what you’ve got, it’s really difficult to make that assessment of what is the risk, what’s the impact, and so spending the time to understand what have you got, then moving really quickly into what are those touch points, so where is that appearing, um, but also then mapping out those customer journeys because it’s really key to see that. End to end piece of where it’s appearing and how it’s impacting, is it making decisions, um, but then also it’s around having that understanding of your your vendors and the ownership and again back to that popular topic of governance as well, establishing some really good strong governance around it. So yeah, start with a list.
Wayne Kay: Yeah, and it’s like you say, it’s not always obvious, is it? It’s not the obvious things that you’re, you’re looking for. So George, do you, do you see this as a compliance challenge or a commercial opportunity for organizations in investing in AI driven CX?
Georgi Georgiev: I think it’s both. I mean, the EU AI Act will require more discipline around AI enabled technology, that’s for sure. Things like Amanda mentioned better inventories, clearer vendor accountability, transparency, human oversight, staff training internally for your own employees, and all of these, yes, are compliance obligations, but they’re also the foundation of scalable AI adoption. So the commercial opportunity is to move from. AI experimentation to AI adoption at scale, but in a responsible and compliant manner which at the end of the day I believe will differentiate successful businesses from those who use AI without the proper compliance framework to support it. So in that sense I firmly believe that the act should not be seen as a break on AI. It’s rather a framework for deploying AI in a way that everyone, your clients, regulators, employees, customers, everyone can trust.
Wayne Kay: That’s really good, thank you. So a question to you both, or either of you, does the EEI Act, EU AI Act impact UK businesses or even US businesses?
Amanda Panks: Yeah Georgie, do you want to go first?
Georgi Georgiev: The answer is yes. I mean, it’s not limited to EU headquartered companies. It may apply to the UK. It may apply to the US and other offshore businesses where they place AI systems on the EU market or they put AI systems into service in the EU or even when they use AI system outputs in the EU. So the decisive factor is not corporate nationality. But whether the AI system is made available or used in the European Union, and also I expect that the EU AI Act will become the practical benchmark for AI related work across the globe, so its relevance and applicability will only increase.
Liz Glagowski: Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to the CX pod wherever you get your podcasts for more CX insights.
