Developing
Conference report: the 89% figure is one research firm's finding, and the Sanas claim is a vendor claim.
In 60 seconds
- Customer Management Practice reported that 89% of customers feel steered toward self-service before they can reach a live person.
- Sessions focused on customer trust, self-service choice, connected data and human oversight more than deployment speed.
- Parloa's Ivy Holt said end-to-end observability is how teams "connect the dots"; Sanas launched Supervised AI at the event.
- Persistent pain points: long hold times, repeat contacts and having to repeat information.
Impact Layer
- What changed
- Contact-centre conversation at a major US event moved from speed of AI deployment to trust and access to humans.
- Why it matters
- Customers who cannot reach a person lose trust, and several regulators are moving toward a right to a human.
- Who is affected
- CX leaders and contact-centre operators planning AI self-service.
- Martech stack area
- AI, Customer Experience
- Stack impact
- Audit your own routes to a human and measure how many customers abandon self-service before getting one.
- Business impact
- Low A conference summary by CX Today. The 89% figure is attributed to CMP's Audrey Steeves and its method is not described.
- Related technologies
- What to watch
- Whether platforms add explicit routes to a human and report on them.
CX Today’s Sophie Wilson reported on October 14, 2026 from CCW Nashville, where discussions focused less on how fast organisations could deploy AI and more on customer trust, self-service choice, connected data and human oversight. A CCWomen Summit ran alongside it.
Key figures and claims
- Customer Management Practice (CMP) reported that 89% of customers feel steered toward self-service before they can reach a live person.
- Sanas launched Supervised AI, which lets one supervisor oversee up to four live AI conversations (a vendor claim; availability by invitation now, broader in December 2026).
- Long hold times, repeat contacts and repeating information remain pain points.
Speakers
Audrey Steeves of CMP; Ivy Holt, VP of AI Enablement at Parloa, who said “having observability from end to end is where you’re going to be able to connect the dots”; and Saurabh Sodhani of Sanas, who said “we can deploy AI at scale, but still have the human in control of all the conversations AI is having”.
The takeaways
CX Today recommends defining the business problem before choosing technology, giving customers a clear route to a human, connecting interaction data across the journey and supporting agents with better context.
Our read
If nearly nine in ten customers feel pushed away from people, a visible “talk to a person” option is a cheap trust fix.
Sources
- CX Today: CCW Nashville 2026, Key AI and Customer Experience Takeaways (opens in a new tab)
Source for the figure, speakers and takeaways.