AI agent for first line contact centre service

In November 2022, a customer used the AI chatbot on Air Canada's website to ask about the airline's bereavement fare policy. The chatbot told him he could buy a full price ticket and claim the fare difference back within 90 days, which contradicted the airline's actual policy that bereavement fares must be requested before the flight. When Air Canada refused the refund, the customer took the airline to the Civil Resolution Tribunal of British Columbia. The tribunal rejected Air Canada's argument that the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions, and found the airline liable for negligent misrepresentation.

Airbnb runs an AI assistant as the first line of customer support for guests and hosts. It was expanded to all US users in 2025 and then rolled out to more countries and languages, reaching more than 50 languages by mid 2026. Airbnb reports the share of issues resolved without a human agent in each quarterly letter and links part of the fall in support cost per booking to the assistant; it plans an AI voice assistant.

Erica, launched in 2018, is Bank of America's virtual financial assistant in its Mobile Banking app. Beyond answering questions it delivers proactive, personalized insights: BankAmeriDeals cash back deals based on the client's spending, where balances are trending over the next seven days and eligibility for the Preferred Rewards program. It also gives guidance on investment topics for Merrill clients and hands off to people by scheduling appointments.

The bank reports that clients have received and interacted with more than 1.7 billion of these insights, and that most users find the information they need, which it links to lower call centre volume. Bank of America says Erica selects answers from a predefined set and does not use generative AI or large language models.

Bank of the Philippine Islands runs BEA Chat, a conversational AI assistant on its website and Facebook page that answers general inquiries around the clock, offers self service for common concerns, lets customers apply for products and track service requests, and escalates complex issues to live agents. It serves both logged in clients and guests, and the bank positions it as a channel for Filipinos working overseas who would otherwise need a local SIM card or international calls. No containment or cost outcome is disclosed.

BBVA México eliminated touch tone (IVR) dialing in its telephone banking service and replaced it with Blue, a generative AI voice assistant. Instead of navigating more than 40 menu options, callers answer one open question in natural language and Blue routes them straight to the right option, using the identification already available from the BBVA Mx app. The bank also uses Blue as a sales assistant that resumes an abandoned digital sales conversation when a customer shows interest in an offer.

Kenya Power (Kenya Power and Lighting Company) launched its first AI chatbot, named Nuru, alongside a redesigned MyPower App and a Kiswahili menu on its USSD short code, for its more than 10 million customers. Nuru answers customer queries on the company's website and its Facebook page, lets customers report incidents such as power outages, and can connect them to a human customer care representative. The launch was part of a wider digital customer engagement upgrade that also added self service billing, token purchase and complaint features to the MyPower App.

Magyar Telekom introduced Vanda, an NLP based virtual assistant, to residential customers in 2018, replacing traditional push button IVR menus with voice controlled service. Built on speech recognition, language understanding and a synthetic voice, Vanda started by resolving about twenty common customer requests end to end on its own, or connecting the caller to the right agent when needed. The operator's customer service director says Vanda now resolves on average 25 to 27 percent of cases, freeing staff for the more complex requests that need expertise, and that satisfaction scores are approaching those of expert human agents.

NatWest routes a wide range of everyday customer queries through Cora, its AI assistant in online banking and the mobile app, now with generative AI (Cora+). Customers whose ATM withdrawal did not pay out are sent to Cora with the phrase "ATM dispute" as the first step of the claim, and the assistant is available before login as well.

NatWest disclosed that Cora handled 10.8 million queries over 2023, more than double the roughly five million it handled in 2019, and that the top five questions asked via Cora are about cancelling a transaction, changing an address, asking for a bank statement, requesting a new bank card or opening an ISA.

NatWest says the generative AI version improved customer satisfaction and reduced how often a colleague has to step in, and in 2025 it began a collaboration with OpenAI to extend the assistant to more complex tasks.

Asiacell, Iraq's largest mobile operator, launched LAILA on 11 November 2024 as what it calls Iraq's first AI powered customer support assistant. LAILA answers customer inquiries and helps with technical issues around the clock, reachable through the Asiacell app, the operator's website, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The launch announcement names no vendor and discloses no usage or resolution figures.

BT Group runs the EE virtual assistant Aimee on Sprinklr's customer experience platform, drawing on BT Group data for personalised answers. The platform lets BT Group use generative AI for EE and BT customers, for example in an Aimee journey that prepares customers for international travel and in billing support, where generative AI gives detailed explanations of billing charges. BT Group says Aimee handles up to 60,000 conversations a week, double the volume of two years earlier, that the travel journey halved the need for chat support, and that it stays model agnostic behind a private cloud instance with safeguards against attempts to make the AI misbehave.

Jordan Ahli Bank launched "ahliGPT", an AI system that answers customer queries about banking and financial services, and announced it as the first bank in the Middle East to bring generative AI into customer service this way. The bank's own announcement names no vendor or launch date beyond the article's publication, and discloses no usage or resolution figures; CEO Ahmad Al-Hussein is quoted on the bank's ambition for the technology rather than on any measured result.

Klarna announced in February 2024 that its AI assistant built on OpenAI models had been live globally for a month as the first line of its customer service, handling refunds, returns, payment issues, cancellations and disputes in more than 35 languages across 23 markets. In 2025 the company said it had gone too far in replacing people and began recruiting human agents again so that customers can always reach a person; the assistant still handles the majority of inquiries. The record is useful precisely because it shows both the gain and the correction.

Poste Italiane's Assistente Digitale was introduced in 2019 alongside human operators and uses artificial intelligence to answer customer service requests by phone, web and app, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It resolves simpler requests quickly (for example a duplicate PIN, balance and transaction list, or blocking a prepaid card) and routes more complex problems to human operators. Over the years it has been extended to financial, telephony, logistics, insurance and energy services. In July 2024 Poste Italiane reported that it had intercepted around 80 million requests since activation, a significant share of them handled autonomously.

Vodafone rebuilt its TOBi chatbot on Azure OpenAI as SuperTOBi, launched in Italy and Portugal, with Germany and Turkey announced to follow from July 2024 and other markets later that year. A companion SuperAgent helps human agents search the company knowledge base and, in Ireland, sends the human agent a summary of the online customer conversation so customers do not repeat themselves. Vodafone reports that initial tests at one of its call centres showed a 50% improvement in first time resolution of critical journeys such as complex billing inquiries, and that in Portugal first time resolution on appointment booking rose from 15% to 60%, with billing journeys being added next.

Vodacom South Africa's TOBi is an AI assistant that answers customer queries such as account balances, SIM swaps, PUK retrieval, invoices and statements, and guides customers through the Self RICA identity verification process, across SMS, WhatsApp, the My Vodacom and VodaPay apps, the web and voice. Vodacom added isiZulu, South Africa's most widely spoken home language, as a second language alongside English, reporting comparable understanding rates for the two languages on both the voice and chat versions of the assistant.

Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer, rolled out the AI chatbot Billie in its 2021 financial year to answer simpler customer enquiries around the clock. Between 2021 and 2023 Billie resolved about 47% of the enquiries it received. With the chatbot taking simpler enquiries, Ingka reskilled 8,500 call centre staff for remote interior design and remote selling, and sales through its remote customer meeting points reached EUR 1.3 billion in its 2022 financial year.

Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB) launched "Zaki," which it describes as the first conversational AI banking service in Qatar, as an additional channel on its website. Zaki answers customer questions about the bank and its products in Arabic and English, around the clock, without the customer needing to visit a branch or call the QIB call centre, and can hand visitors to a list of tailored products or a sales call back. QIB positioned Zaki as the foundation for a later voice and chat enabled conversational banking service, with transaction capability and a mobile app presence planned as future releases.

Zenith Bank, one of Nigeria's largest banks, launched ZiVA (Zenith Intelligent Virtual Assistant), an AI powered chatbot on WhatsApp, so customers could transact and get real time customer service around the clock on the encrypted messaging platform they already used. Through ZiVA, customers can open new accounts, receive instant transaction notifications, check balances, transfer funds, top up airtime, confirm cheques, pay bills, apply for loans, block their accounts and request mini statements. Group Managing Director Ebenezer Onyeagwu said the launch was driven by the need for additional secured communication channels as the bank deepened its retail penetration.

Kotak Mahindra Bank launched Keya in April 2018, billed as Indian banking's first AI powered voicebot, built with Nuance and integrated into the bank's phone banking helpline alongside the existing IVR. Keya uses speech recognition, natural language understanding and text to speech to identify what a caller wants, verify it and route simple requests to self service while sending complex calls to a human agent, so customers no longer have to navigate the traditional IVR menu.

Nordea, the leading Nordic bank, built its virtual agent Nova on the boost.ai conversational AI platform, starting with Nordea Norway in 2017 and extending it to Sweden, Denmark and Finland in 2021, so that customers who open chat on the web or in the mobile app in any of the four countries reach Nova first, before any human agent.

Nordea's Group Head of AI Strategy and Acceleration, Mattias Fras, and business owners in each country describe Nova as central to a chat first customer service strategy that, as of a case study last updated in March 2026, runs 12 AI agents across the four markets, in each market's own language as well as English in some countries, covering both customer facing questions and internal support functions such as HR.

The case study reports Nova handling over 220,000 conversations a month for private banking customers across the Nordics, with Nordea Sweden reporting a 91 percent in scope resolution rate for private banking customers and 95 percent for corporate customers.

OTE Group, the Deutsche Telekom controlled operator that runs one of the highest volume customer support operations in Greece for its Cosmote TV pay TV service, built a generative AI voice agent with vendor Wonderful, integrated with its Genesys telephony and backend systems. The agent covers ten skill areas, including subscriber authentication, troubleshooting and satellite reset, package and pricing information, profile management, service barring and programme lookup. OTE's chief customer operations officer and CIO are both quoted on the deployment, which Wonderful describes as production grade and handling tens of thousands of calls.

ABN AMRO moved to Microsoft Copilot Studio to build two AI assistants: Anna for customers and Abby for employees. Anna now handles a large share of the bank's first line customer contact by text and voice, automating more than half of those interactions with a set of AI agents working together, while Abby gives employees easier access to IT and other internal resources.

Ooredoo Qatar unified its call centre and digital channels (app, web, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and X) on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Omnichannel, so more than two hundred agents who had worked each channel separately now share one platform and one view of the customer. Its AI assistant Obot, built on Microsoft AI Foundry and Azure AI Services, resolves a substantial share of customer queries without human intervention, and Ooredoo later extended Obot with a GPT real time voice avatar and made it available to retail customers across the same social channels. Microsoft's case study on the programme reports that average handling time fell from seven to five minutes.

Pegasus Airlines retrained FlyBot, the virtual assistant on its website, with Azure OpenAI and integrated it with internal systems, so customers can ask about flights, flight rules, baggage allowances and claims and reissue tickets in the same conversation. The airline reports that satisfaction with the virtual assistant doubled after the change.

Together Credit Union runs a voice agent on its inbound phone line that answers member questions, resolves routine requests and hands the rest to a person, drawing on one knowledge base that the branch, contact centre and chat channels also use. The vendor reports that the agent now contains the majority of inbound calls, 12 points more than at the start, that after hours escalations to an outsourced contact centre fell, and that member satisfaction held above 94% during the rollout.

Commonwealth Bank built a central AI orchestration agent that reads the customer's intent and routes it to a conversational AI, retrieval over public content, a deterministic guarded path for regulated journeys such as fraud disputes, or a human specialist with the full context, on its messaging channel. It migrated nearly 700 chatbot topics and launched a generative AI banking chatbot in November 2024. Voice bots are a planned extension of the orchestration layer.

Telkomsel, with more than 159 million mobile subscribers, rebuilt its Veronika virtual assistant on Azure OpenAI to handle routine customer questions in Bahasa Indonesia with the local accents and expressions its first chatbot could not follow, so that human agents could focus on complex issues. Telkomsel's chief information officer says the architecture can handle up to 5 million transactions a month. Telkomsel's chief marketing officer says customer self service interactions rose from 19% to 45% after the launch.

Vietcombank, a leading Vietnamese bank, built VCB Digibot with FPT Smart Cloud on the FPT.AI platform to answer routine questions around the clock on cards, loans, interest rates, preferential offers, exchange rates and the branch network, and to hand off anything beyond that scope to a human advisor. The aim was to free the bank's advisory team from repeating the same routine questions so they could spend more time on complex cases, while giving customers an immediate response over chat at any hour.

TOBi is Vodafone's digital assistant on the website, the My Vodafone app, messaging and telephony, first launched in Italy and extended to 15 language versions. It handles billing questions, contract updates and simple technical troubleshooting, hands over to a live agent with a summary, and during the pandemic made the same sales offers as human agents, such as data boosts and upgrades. Microsoft reports that TOBi now fully resolves 70% of inquiries arriving through digital channels; an earlier Microsoft story quotes Vodafone on a 12% year on year fall in contacts to call centres after launch.

Air India launched AI.g in May 2023, a virtual assistant on Azure OpenAI that is integrated with the reservation system and answers questions across 1,300 topic areas including bookings, flight status, baggage, check in, frequent flyer awards and lounge access, and escalates automatically to contact centre staff when it detects the need. The airline says it has kept contact centre call volume flat while its passenger count doubled.

Equity Bank Kenya officially commissioned EVA, the Equity Virtual Assistant, in May 2022 to replace EazzyNet's customer support role with a chatbot that runs on artificial intelligence and machine learning models. On WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Telegram, customers can chat with EVA to manage their accounts and carry out transactions such as money transfers, airtime purchases and viewing account balances, in addition to general customer support, and Equity says the assistant will keep learning from its interactions with customers.

Etihad Airways built a chatbot on Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and Dynamics 365 Customer Service to handle the surge in customer questions during the pandemic, including changing travel restrictions, refunds, cancellations and booking. By February 2022 the chatbot served 52 percent of customers on its own, freeing agents for more complex cases and reducing waiting time, and the airline reports a rise in its Net Promoter Score since the launch.

Mobily deployed customer facing AI agents on eight channels, including WhatsApp, Twitter and Apple Business Chat, connected to its internal systems. The agents answer billing, balance and data usage questions, change subscriptions, sell add ons, take payments and recharges, and handle feedback and complaints, with a warm handover to a specialist who can take over or hand back. NiCE Cognigy reports that the first response time fell from 20 minutes to about 6 seconds. The deployment was already live in 2022, when the case study described it as conversational AI; the current version presents it as agentic AI.

Attijariwafa bank launched what it called Morocco's first banking chatbot in May 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, as an AI based virtual assistant on the bank's institutional website answering customer questions around the clock. At launch the assistant covered a limited scope in French, mainly pandemic related measures and an Attijarinet password reset, with the bank's own announcement saying future versions would add languages, new use cases and other channels. No usage or resolution figures are disclosed, and no later update confirming a wider rollout was found.

During the pandemic, when passengers flooded call centres to change or cancel flights, Lufthansa Group replaced its in house chatbot with a conversational AI platform and built self service AI agents that manage rebookings, check alternative flights, give travel information and process refunds. The agents run on the airline websites and through SMS links that open a self service chat, with multilingual support and real time translation, and are used to absorb peaks such as strikes.

Vodafone Germany moved its messaging channels into one central team and put the TOBi chatbot in front of every WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat and SMS conversation, with a handover to a human agent on the same screen. TOBi understands more than 230 intents and can classify the photos and screenshots customers send, such as a bill or a router with a flashing red light. Genesys reports that the share of inquiries resolved by AI (which it calls first contact success) rose from 16% at launch to 44%.

Bank ABC introduced "Fatema," an AI powered digital employee built on Soul Machines' Digital DNA technology and announced as the first synthetic digital human Soul Machines deployed. Fatema uses an AI powered Digital Brain to engage personally with customers and was set to work alongside the team of Bank ABC's mobile only bank to offer personalised customer service, sharing news and updates on social media and letting customers talk to her by voice on specific digital channels. Bank ABC's Deputy Group CEO framed the launch as part of the bank's push into digital innovation in the region.

China Unicom's Sichuan provincial unit partnered with JD.com to put JD's AI customer service chatbot into its voice and WeChat channels. Callers to the customer service hotline are greeted by a natural sounding AI voice that directs them and can hand off to a human agent, and the same AI answers inbound questions on China Unicom's public WeChat account. JD also builds China Unicom Sichuan an AI based precision marketing capability as part of the same partnership.

JetBlue moved its customer support to an AI platform from late 2019, opening messaging channels (Apple Messages for Business, Google Business Messaging, web and app chat, WhatsApp) with Spanish language support, a virtual agent that resolves routine requests and AI assistance for the crewmembers who handle the rest.

In a January 2026 conference session published by the vendor, a JetBlue customer support leader described weather disruptions, when passengers ask for their options, and said the conversations crewmembers now handle (rebooking, refunds, alternatives weeks away) are multifaceted, which is why the airline has looked at AI that orchestrates several workflows. The ASAPP speaker in the same session warned against reading containment gains without checking whether customers still have the option to escalate.