The Rehiring Boomerang: What Gartner is Really Telling Us About AI in Contact Centres

Instead of building ROI on forced redundancies, we align AI deployment to reality. We, as a contact centre industry, already face sustained attrition, recruitment challenges and a year-on-year demand growth.

AI is applied to absorb that demand, reduce the need to backfill roles and stabilise operations over time. In this model, organisations effectively recruit AI agents alongside their human workforce, evolving the make-up of their capacity.

Where I believe many strategies fall down is in how value is defined. ROI models built purely on FTE reduction ignore the additional capacity and value AI creates. That capacity can be reinvested to improve experience quality, increase resilience, extend service coverage and shift organisations away from reactive, failure-driven contact towards proactive engagement that adds measurable business and customer value.

When AI is applied this way, rehiring is not an inevitable outcome, it is a symptom of poor design choices.

The organisations Gartner is pointing to did not fail because AI lacked capability. Because, it simply doesn’t. In my view, they failed because automation was confused with transformation.

AI was introduced without sufficient consideration of workforce dynamics, customer complexity or change management.

This is why Sabio positions itself as an expert services partner rather than a technology-first vendor. The technology is rarely the hard part.

The challenge is designing an AI strategy that balances efficiency, experience and people in a way that holds up beyond the next earnings call.

For me, Gartner’s prediction should prompt a simple question for every service leader: is your AI strategy designed to deliver sustainable change, or short-term proof points?

The answer will determine whether you are building a future-ready operating model or quietly preparing to rehire the roles you removed under a different name.