The call center just died. Nobody told the agents yet

AI isn't coming for customer service. It's already running it.

Klarna's AI assistant handles 2.3 million conversations a month. That's two-thirds of their customer chats, with the work output of 700 agents. Resolution time dropped from 11 minutes to 2. Customer satisfaction scores went up.

Think that's an outlier? Every major enterprise is quietly rolling out the same playbook. They don't sleep, don't take breaks, and get smarter with every interaction.

For years, AI was the overeager intern of the call center world. Quick, cheap, but not quite ready for an angry customer demanding a manager. Now it is the manager. And the agent. And the quality control team.

This isn't 1980s factory automation where robots replaced assembly workers over decades. This is happening in quarters, not years.

Humans will stick around for edge cases and escalations. But that's just corporate speak for "we're keeping a skeleton crew until the AI handles that too."

Here's what PE needs to understand:

Traditional call center rollups are dead money. Labor arbitrage disappears when the labor does. But the platforms enabling this shift? That's where the 10x returns live.

Stop buying bodies. Start buying the tech that replaces them.

The best-rated customer experiences in the world will soon be delivered by something that's never been a customer.

And the agents? They're about to learn what travel agents learned 20 years ago.

Some disruptions announce themselves. This one's just handling your return quietly, efficiently, and better than any human ever could.