: 10.56472/25835238/IRJEMS-V5I4P113
Nihat Mehdizade. "Limits of Automation in Contact Centers: Analyzing Customer Inquiries beyond the Capabilities of AI" International Research Journal of Economics and Management Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 94-109, 2026. Crossref. http://doi.org/10.56472/25835238/IRJEMS-V5I4P113
The advent of artificial intelligence implemented at contact centers and its fast increase in usage has transformed customer service by allowing for a widespread automation of the huge quantity of interactions occurring in an operation, but the limits of this automation are still not well defined, particularly when dealing with complex customer queries. We investigate the extent to which inquiry difficulty affects the probability of escalation from AI agents to human assistants in contact center settings. The analysis is from a dataset of 9,177 customer touchpoints from an AI-enabled telecommunications contact centre for 4 months (September–December 2025). The results indicated, through descriptive and binary logistic regression, a strong, statistically relevant relationship between the complexity of the inquiry and the rate of escalation, with 5.3% in the low complexity setting increasing to 87.0% in the high level. The regression outcomes further reveal that for each 1-unit increase in complexity, the probability of escalation increases by about 72.6%, illustrating a strong effect size. These findings reflect the fact that, although AI systems deliver very well when used for typical and specific inquiries, they do remarkably poorly in complex, ambiguous and multi-issue encounters. By discovering that inquiry complexity is a critical factor in the operational limits of AI-based automation, the study adds to the literature and provides insights on how organizations can mitigate these to drive both operational efficiency and service experience with hybrid service models and complexity-based routing strategies.
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Automation, Contact Centers, Customer Inquiries, Ai Agents, Escalation, Chatbots, Voicebots, Inquiry Complexity.