The 4 agent archetypes

How does your customer experience team use AI? Is AI an autonomous decision maker running point on customer issues by itself? Or is it a teammate that your human agents depend on?

And what are you hoping to gain from AI in the CX workflow? Is the goal to reduce costs?

Gartner developed a recent report, The Future of Customer Service Agents and AI. In it, they found that as customer service integrates AI into its solutions, human agents are evolving into specialized roles that work alongside AI to improve customer conversations.

Now is when organizations need to decide what their primary objectives are. However, Gladly makes the choice easy. We provide all four of the agent archetypes that Gartner outlined. See what they are here and learn which ones apply best to your CX team.

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The 4 archetypes

AI in CX is changing how organizations deliver on customer experience. Many CX leaders are asking themselves “how will this automation change my agents’ roles going forward?”

Gartner’s report takes interviews with thought leaders in the space about these changing roles and developed four agent archetypes. Each one has a different vision of how human agents and AI coexist in customer service interactions.

1. Efficiency experts

First up are efficiency experts. These are human agents who achieve operational excellence with the help of AI.

They’re similar to traditional customer service agents in that they focus on delivering first-class support. Their main difference is that they use AI as a teammate to maximize efficiency in customer service interactions. These agents operate with the goal of accelerating the pace of customer conversations and helping their organization stay competitive in the market. They use internal AI tools to streamline operations and look for new ways to automate routine tasks.

2. Personalization specialists

Personalization specialists are what Gartner defines as human agents who deliver more personalized customer experiences with AI.

These agents focus on increasing loyalty and boosting retention across CX touch points. They handle more complex or emotionally charged needs, leaving the low-complexity interactions to self-service. They augment their emotional intelligence and product knowledge with AI tools that provide additional context and suggest appropriate responses based on customers’ sentiment.

3. Resolution supervisors

Gartner defines resolution supervisors as human agents who oversee AI systems that provide convenient automated interactions. Simply put, they are AI agent managers.

Resolutions supervisors monitor multiple digital conversations with real-time dashboards, letting them see how AI systems solve customer issues. They can step in and provide support to customers if the AI technology has a problem or hallucination. Resolution supervisors also provide feedback to IT teams about how to improve the AI agent’s performance.

4. Exceptional interventionists

Finally, we get to the last archetype: exceptional interventionists. These human agents intervene when their empathy or problem-solving skills would add value.

Exceptional interventionists collaborate with AI solutions that process large datasets, analyze customer behaviors, and make real-time decisions. They thrive in organizations that champion a "digital-first" strategy because they know that many customers favor convenient self-service interactions over human engagement. But, exceptional interventionists are always ready to jump in to bring empathy to any situation that the AI agent deems as too complex.

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Why these archetypes make sense

It's crucial to consider the strategic questions that shape future agent roles within your organization:

What does your organization aim to accomplish with AI?
To what extent can your organization rely on AI for decision-making?

The four archetypes help you answer those questions and map out a more successful AI implementation. Most likely, you’ll want to combine aspects of multiple agent archetypes, too. So it’s good to plan an AI rollout with these archetypes in mind.

As customer expectations grow and they desire faster resolutions, industries will have to adapt and scale to stay relevant and competitive. So it becomes an advantage to employ efficiency expert agents on channels like chat and SMS that require operational excellence. On the other hand, adopting more self-service channels would mean your human agents operate more as resolution supervisors overseeing large-scale automated interactions.

Regardless of how an organization plans to evolve agents' roles, prioritizing employee experience is crucial. Currently, only 14% of customer service leaders consider improving employee experience among their top 3 priorities, according to Gartner's Customer Service and Support Priorities for 2025 Survey. However, the future demands a balance between human agents' and AI capabilities to achieve organizational objectives. Customer service leaders have to involve agents in change management initiatives and equip them for new, AI-intertwined ways of working.

Only 14% of customer service leaders consider improving employee experience among their top 3 priorities

Customer Service and Support Priorities for 2025 Survey, Gartner

Gladly gives you archetype flexibility

With Gladly, there’s no need to sacrifice AI for customer experience or cost efficiency — and no need to choose between autonomous AI or AI that partners with your human agents. Gladly is the right choice for CX now and in the future because we offer a customer-centric, AI-powered solution that evolves with the needs of your organization. Our platform supports all four of Gartner’s agent archetypes, allowing organizations to adopt and adapt customer service strategies as needed.

Here are some Gladly capabilities and how your human agents can benefit from them based on the archetypes you implement:

AI Authoring: Gladly offers AI Authoring to help human agents improve the tone and polish drafted responses. It’s ideal for personalization specialists.
Conversation Summaries: The Conversation Summaries feature automatically generates a summary of a customer conversation to give efficiency experts and personalization specialists the quick context needed to resolve issues.
Guides: Gladly’s Guides feature makes it easy to set up and maintain AI in your CX solution, which is perfect for resolution supervisors.
Journeys: The Journeys feature is also great for resolution supervisors because it helps agents monitor and improve AI-driven customer experience outcomes.
Sidekick Answers: This Gladly capability is one that efficiency experts will depend on. Sidekick Answers resolves common customer questions with info from your public knowledge base to ensure responses are consistent with your company's approved messaging.
Sidekick Actions: Our Sidekick Actions capability integrates with third-party apps to cancel orders, update subscriptions, and process refunds, which is great for efficiency experts. But it still knows when to reach out to an exceptional interventionist to get a human’s perspective and guidance, too.

Choosing Gladly means CX teams can confidently navigate the future of customer service, balancing AI capabilities with human expertise to deliver exceptional customer experiences while also prioritizing agent satisfaction and growth.

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