Consumer expectations are rising, but so are the expectations placed on the contact center. Consumers want faster, more personalized service, while contact center leaders are being asked to manage efficiency and increase loyalty, retention, and growth. The contact center is no longer just where issues are handled. It’s increasingly where some of the most important moments between an organization and its customers take place.
Agentic innovations like conversational intelligence creates an opportunity to rethink those moments. For decades, contact centers have been optimized around operational metrics like handle time, deflection, and cost per contact, rather than the customer and business outcomes that matter most. Conversational intelligence can help shift that focus, but contact centers weren’t built to change at the pace technology is moving. Simply bolting on existing solutions or deploying it in isolation risks creating another silo without the broader context needed to understand the customer, take the right action, and improve the experience. We think there’s a better way.
Today, we’re excited to announce Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence (CCI). Now in public preview, Microsoft CCI adds purpose-built agents, quality, and analytics to existing contact centers. We’ve taken the agentic capabilities built into Dynamics 365 Contact Center and extended them to work with any other contact center through an open connector.
For organizations that can’t wait for a multi-year rip-and-replace to access modern conversational intelligence, Microsoft CCI brings enterprise security, governance, and extensibility to the contact center they already have. Unlike other standalone solutions, Microsoft CCI is powered by Microsoft IQ, which combines your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM), contact center insights, and organizational intelligence into the real-time context that AI needs to reason, act, and resolve.
Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence is organized around three agents and outcomes that matter most to the business: a Customer Assist Agent that resolves autonomously or empowers human representatives in real time to improve resolution; a Quality Assurance Agent that continuously evaluates interactions against quality, compliance, and brand standards; and a Service Operations Agent (coming soon) that helps configure, monitor, and optimize the contact center while managing costs.
Features in Microsoft CCI include:
- Agentic self-service: Create multimodal self-service experiences at scale more easily using a new designer and customer conversation harness. Design your interactions in the Customer Assist Agent to resolve customer needs across voice and digital channels, providing customers with fast, natural, and personalized support.
- Quality, analytics, and performance: Evaluate both agentic and human-led interactions, identifying opportunities for service improvements with the Quality Assurance Agent. Create your own customized guardrails across areas like greetings, brand compliance, or sentiment to help improve quality and consistency at scale.
- Easy integration to your existing contact center: Integrate Microsoft CCI with your existing contact center. An open connector easily integrates Microsoft CCI with third-party contact centers, enabling organizations to add AI without major migrations.
- Data and integrations: Ground agents in data from Microsoft IQ, knowledge sources, and more than 1,700 connectors.
- Biometric authentication: Authenticate customers in the moment using voice biometrics, helping establish identity within the natural flow of the interaction while reducing unnecessary authentication steps.
- Manage and govern agents at scale with Microsoft Agent 365: Deploy, monitor, and manage agents across the contact center through a centralized experience. Agent 365 gives organizations visibility into agent performance and business outcomes, with governance to help manage agents responsibly at scale.
Organizations can bring context, judgment, and natural conversation to interactions, whether they are handled by an agent, a contact center representative, or the two working together.
When a customer has a question or issue about any of our system/solution or administrative support, they need our support for resolution, fast, accurate, in compliant with safety as their need for their patient.
Our goal is to bring the same precision of our support experience that we bring via our engineering knowledge and capabilities of being able to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues. With Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence layered onto the Genesys and ServiceNow platforms that we have enabled, we’re building toward a future where both routine and complex remote support can be resolved immediately through agents, without a queue and long wait time and at times while our teams can focus on the moments that need human intervention. By extending conversational intelligence into the support ecosystems, we expect to deliver faster resolution, greater customer confidence, and a support operation that scales with our business for our customers.
Bishan Dass, Digital Development Lead – Americas, Siemens Healthineers
Modernize your existing contact center
Connectors make it easy to integrate Microsoft CCI with contact center vendors like Five9, Cisco WebEx Contact Center, and Avaya.
Once connected, you can start creating self-service agents across voice and digital channels with a new customer conversation harness. In Microsoft CCI, you can build, test, evaluate, and deploy an agent that is configured for your business needs and grounded in your data. Customers can also start configuring Microsoft CCI from the customer conversation harness in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
Powered by a choice of models, your Microsoft CCI agent can handle a variety of interactions, helping resolve the questions that clog contact center queues today.
You can shape self-service behavior by supporting deterministic flows when a call must follow a set path, generative interactions when the caller’s question is open-ended, or a hybrid of the two. And when an interaction meets your organization’s criteria for engaging human assistance, there is a built-in handoff in Customer Assist Agent to a human customer service rep through the contact center or even Microsoft Teams.
This provides a clear, reliable way to navigate questions about enrollment, eligibility, coverage, billing, and more as we bring specialized AI agents into our existing HR Service Desk workflow on our timeline. We began the preview in September, and just six weeks later, we are preparing to go live. That speed gives us a faster path to measurable value.
Luis Taveras, EVP, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Thomas Jefferson University
Quality, compliance, and brand at scale
Quality assurance is also available in Microsoft CCI, giving organizations a more systematic way to measure service quality, compliance, and brand adherence. Microsoft CCI evaluates historical self-service conversations today against out-of-the-box and custom metrics you define, with real-time evaluation coming soon. Measure up to 100% of conversations instead of relying on period sampling.
Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence is held to the same Multimodal Agent Score (MAS) quality bar used for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, helping us consistently evaluate experiences across both human and AI agents. Learn more about MAS.
Trust in the flow of work
Microsoft CCI provides native biometric authentication support. With voice biometric enrollment and authentication, end customers can choose to use their voiceprint to verify their identity during a live call, bringing authentication into the natural flow of the conversation. Building identity into the interaction can create a smoother authentication experience by reducing the need to take customers out of the conversation for separate verification. This can reduce the time to authenticate and increase trust in the process.
When an organization’s guardrails determine that a conversation needs human assistance, the interaction can transition to a human contact center representative while preserving the authentication.
Manage and govern contact center intelligence at scale
Agent 365 provides a centralized control plane for managing, governing, and optimizing agents across the enterprise, including the contact center. Agent 365 had nearly 40 million registered agents across tens of thousands of companies as of July 2026. With Agent 365, available standalone or as part of Microsoft 365 E7, your agents don’t operate in a silo.
Customers don’t wake up wishing they could replace their contact center platform. They want better customer experiences, more productive agents, and the business outcomes AI can deliver. The challenge is that a full platform migration is often expensive, disruptive, and difficult to justify.
Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence gives organizations another option. It allows them to bring Microsoft’s AI capabilities into their existing contact center environment, helping them modernize customer and agent experiences without a rip-and-replace project. That means faster time to value, lower risk, and the flexibility to adopt AI on their terms.
Karl Phenix Vice President, Microsoft GTM & Solution, TTEC
Getting started with Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence
Getting started with Microsoft CCI is simple. Unlike most contact center solutions, agentic capabilities in Microsoft CCI are usage-based through Copilot Credits, which scales cost with adoption.1
Sign in to the Microsoft CCI portal, connect to your existing contact center, and configure your first agent against a single self-service scenario, such as a high-volume call type that fills your queue today.
Microsoft CCI is available now in global public preview, with the exception of Austria. Innovations available soon will include real-time evaluations and coaching, contact center agent assist, and more. Try Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence today!
Explore Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence resources:
- Get started with Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence.
- Explore Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence documentation.
- Read about the new customer conversation harness.
Transform your contact center with conversational intelligence
Bring agentic self-service, quality assurance, authentication, and analytics to your existing contact center with Microsoft Contact Center Intelligence.
1Please note: some contact center vendors charge for API access or licenses to access their voice channel. Those costs are not included in Microsoft CCI.
