Back to the Future: From Call Centers to AI Agents

Over the last thirty years, call centers had their golden age.

At the beginning of the 21st century, as businesses started using words like optimization and outsourcing, it became popular to move support functions to third-party service providers. Before that, companies had their own phone operators. Call centers gave them more flexibility, better ability to handle changing volumes, and relatively controlled costs.

This was before the mass adoption of email and before the spam era.

Call centers called everyone, everywhere — to sell products, take orders, or provide customer support after a product or service had been purchased. Millions of operators worked every day. And we should be grateful, because many of today’s entrepreneurs grew out of those call centers. They learned how to communicate, sell, and understand customers there.

But the shift has already happened. Very few people have noticed it.

Over the last twenty years, many businesses managed to reduce or eliminate call centers by moving customers to web forms. Self-service became the new standard. When customers buy from an e-shop, there is no need to pay a call center operator anymore.

From product or service discovery, to order placement, to customer support — everything moved into HTML forms.

The customer barely noticed that they were now doing the work that operators used to do.

Today, we are living through a new shift.

Forms no longer satisfy the user. It is not only that users have to fill them in, do the work themselves, and waste time. The whole process has become too complex.

There are now so many products and services that neither SEO, nor reviews, nor recommendation systems can properly handle the choice. Google worked well when you had to choose between 10 products — not 1,000. Add hundreds of filters, product variations, colors, sizes, types, and options — and suddenly “choosing smartly” becomes work.

Today, ordering a product or service often means browsing for 20 minutes and then spending even more time filling in forms.

And then GPT entered everyone’s home.

People started using it intuitively, the same way they once used Google Search.

Because it is natural for humans to ask, not to search.

That is why LLMs will fundamentally change our consumption habits. They will bring us back to the original way of interacting: we ask, we explain what we want, and the system understands — instead of forcing us to fill screens with forms.

Current LLM agents already make this possible.

Sales agents and customer support agents powered by LLMs can already work in multiple languages, 24/7, all year round, without holidays.

So in many ways, this is Back to the Future.