Genesys banks on AI customer service agents -- and their orchestration

Genesys, which is rapidly advancing its agentic AI customer service technology, has thrown open the doors of its platform to agents of many stripes and is reinforcing the backbone of its agentic orchestration layer to keep them all in line.

Customers attending the annual Xperience user conference, September 1-3 in Las Vegas, saw the release of AI Control Plane, a governance layer for AI agents, and Contextual Intelligence, which preserves customer identity and history to inform real-time actions not just in a single customer call, but throughout the entire customer journey.

Also previewed were two major initiatives in development, planned for release starting in November and continuing through next spring.

First is Genesys Cloud Navigator, an AI-powered routing system that purports to understand customer intent at the outset of contact -- and throughout -- and routes the customer along the right path, whether that's a workflow, an AI customer service agent, or a human.

Second is Genesys Cloud Orchestrator, which selects the agentic, workflow or human customer service tools required to accomplish the outcome a customer needs -- based on intent signals from Navigator -- needed to solve a case.

Environments like these are key to getting productivity out of agents working together in concert, said Ian Jacobs, analyst at Opus Research.

"As AI proliferates in CX organizations, governing each agent that you roll out individually just becomes untenable. It becomes a scaling problem," Jacobs said.

"The problem is no longer building a great AI agent; it's creating the infrastructure that enterprises can use to know which agents exist, what they're allowed to do, whether they're behaving appropriately [and] thinking about them as an AI agent army, workforce or however you want to think of a collection of AI agents."

Genesys built -- or is building -- a chunk of its latest agentic customer service features and infrastructure using technology acquired from Pinkfish earlier this year. Pinkfish, launched in 2024 by former Talkdesk tech talent, had created some 25,000 Model Context Protocol workflow and automation tools earlier this year.

Orchestration evolves with agentic AI

The Navigator and Orchestrator combination is a very different way of looking at automating customer service than previous contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms have historically taken, said Jack Nichols, vice president of product management at Genesys. Currently, user-designed call flows might route a customer to a bot. When the bot can't handle the case, the customer enters a call queue and waits on hold for a human.

"This is saying, 'Okay, based on this intent data, context and history I have on a customer -- [and looking at] the resources I have access to -- here are the right resources to build out a dynamic plan to address the customer's issue,'" Nichols said.

Finally, Genesys expanded partnerships and integrations with Adobe, AWS, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Meta, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Sierra to connect agents and speech-to-text tools to the Genesys ecosystem through Agent2Agent protocols; to work with Genesys' own agents created in the Agentic Virtual Agent (AVA) builder; and to orchestrate workflows to solve customer service cases.

Genesys also previewed tools that will test and validate AVAs, or "virtual coworkers." Pinkfish technologies also promise to speed development of agents that perform different business processes and provide connections to popular back-end applications and data systems.

Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with more than 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.