The contact centre industry is undergoing a massive transition as it moves beyond traditional, reactive chatbots to deploy Agentic AI—intelligent virtual agents that can autonomously reason, plan, and execute multi-step workflows. However, as businesses rush to integrate this technology, they are colliding with a new and daunting financial reality: always-on AI is incredibly expensive.
Unlike traditional software that relies on flat-rate subscriptions, the economics of AI are fundamentally different because they require enormous computing power and energy. Most providers have shifted toward pay-as-you-go models where every single AI query incurs a computer power cost.
The financial danger of this shift is stark, especially given how quickly even light usage can result in massive expenses. Writing for The Times, Katie Prescott highlighted this exact problem when her office was forced to transition their AI agent to a usage-based billing structure: “Snappy had been living on our corporate $200-a-month Anthropic subscription. Under the new pay-as-you-go model, even with only a couple of days of minimal use and his limited capabilities, Snappy racked up a $150 bill”.
Because contact centre AI agents do not sleep or take breaks, their consumption of data tokens can be colossal, quickly blowing past budget expectations and racking up exorbitant bills. To ensure cost optimisation, contact centres must strategically manage exactly when these AI agents are turned on and when they are turned off.
At the same time, human agents remain a vital part of the contact centre ecosystem. To attract and retain a strong workforce, companies must provide their human employees with enough scheduled hours to earn a comfortable living. Naturally, guaranteeing these hours means there will inevitably be periods of idle time or “hidden capacity” during their shifts. Rather than paying high per-query fees for Agentic AI to process interactions while human staff sit idle, contact centres can optimise costs by routing work to humans and turning the AI bots off during these lulls.
The core challenge in our industry has consistently been balancing employee experience, customer satisfaction, and business performance. QStory has already fundamentally altered this dynamic by introducing an agile scheduling and optimisation solution. Our platform achieves the optimal employee experience while simultaneously meeting crucial business requirements for efficient operations and customer service. It does this by proactively managing operations, optimising scheduling and enabling rapid intervention when necessary.
To optimise resources in customer-facing businesses, the next crucial step is implementing dynamic, cost-saving handoffs between humans and AI, replacing legacy systems. This shift must be managed to consistently meet customer service expectations while also ensuring employees are valued and their work/life expectations are fulfilled. In this way instead of competing business priorities we can have aligned and complementary; AI supported business efficiencies, happy employees and superior customer service.
Fiona Coleman, QStory CEO & Co-Founder, explores the rising costs of Agentic AI and the need for a strategic balance between automation and human talent. Please get in touch at hello@qstory.ai if you have any questions.