When it comes to delivering great customer service, small businesses face a double challenge: They must provide excellent experiences to differentiate themselves from larger rivals while also managing tight budgets and lean teams. Like a gift from above, agentic artificial intelligence has arrived to help them do more with less.
Agentic AI goes beyond traditional automation tools in that it can understand, reason and act independently. While ordinary automation technology follows rules, agentic AI pursues goals. And one area where that can be seen increasingly clearly is within contact centers.
Early chatbots could answer simple questions about store hours or return policies. Agentic systems go several steps further. They can recognize a customer’s issue, access relevant data and take the right actions. An agent can, for example create (and close) support tickets, send follow-up emails, and process payments. And it can learn from every interaction to improve over time. Think of it as a virtual employee that never sleeps, capable of handling both voice and chat conversations around the clock.
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For a small business, that translates to faster response times; lower operating costs; and a consistent, branded customer experience. In other words, agentic AI is a force multiplier — a way to extend your customer service capacity without expanding head count. In many deployments, we’ve seen live agent workload reduced by 30% to 60%.
A Big Shift in What AI Can Do
Traditional automation tools react to customer prompts: If a user says “X,” respond with “Y.” Agentic AI, by contrast, reasons about what’s happening and plans next steps. For example, if a customer calls a heating and cooling company after business hours, agentic AI can recognize the caller’s number, check service records, see that the last visit was for a furnace issue, offer a follow-up appointment, book the visit and send a confirmation — all without human intervention.
That kind of proactive, personalized engagement is already possible today. The same principles apply to retail, finance or any service-based business. A garden center’s AI assistant might recommend soil for a plant, offer an upsell for landscaping services and process payments.
It’s natural to assume that this kind of capability is out of reach for smaller organizations, but that’s no longer the case. Thanks to low-code and no-code AI platforms, small businesses can build capable systems without hiring data scientists.
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The AI-Powered Contact Center: Where To Start
The best way to begin is by using what you already have. Most small businesses running modern contact center platforms — such as Cisco Webex Contact Center, RingCentral or Five9 — already have AI capabilities available. Start there. Evaluate what’s included, identify underused features and consider running a small proof of concept.
If you’re ready to explore entry-level tools, solutions such as RingCentral offer user-friendly, low-code interfaces and flexible pricing. For organizations already invested in Microsoft or Google ecosystems, Power Virtual Agents and Dialogflow are logical starting points.
As agentic AI becomes more capable, the goal should be to scale thoughtfully. Start simple — perhaps automating after-hours inquiries or appointment scheduling — and expand as you gain confidence. Build feedback loops so the system can learn from customer interactions, and keep humans in the loop for oversight and quality control.
The shift from automation to autonomy is already underway. What were once reactive systems are now autonomous partners that can reason, plan and act on behalf of your business. For small organizations, that means 24/7 service, reduced workloads and happier customers — all without breaking the budget.
And with the right guidance and integration support from partners such as CDW, agentic AI is something small businesses can implement — and benefit from — right now.
This article is part of BizTech's AgilITy blog series.
