Orchestration: The New Focus for CX in the Age of AI Agents
VentureBeat | The Independent Voice on AI
July 26, 2026 | 7:30 am PT
Presented by Tata Communications
Enterprises are rapidly adopting AI agents, voice AI, and automation across various channels—messaging, voice, and digital—faster than the infrastructure designed to support these innovations. According to Gaurav Anand, global head of the Customer Interaction Suite at Tata Communications, much of this deployment involves attaching conversational AI to legacy systems not initially built for such purposes.
"In the rush to deploy AI, organizations have largely bolted conversational AI onto legacy systems," Anand notes. "As a result, while many enterprises have embraced digital tools, very few possess platforms that are genuinely integrated, scalable, and capable of seamless orchestration."
This gap creates a significant cognitive burden on human agents who must then piece together context across disparate tools to understand what an AI system has previously conveyed to a customer. The challenge is not merely data access but the absence of a shared enterprise context that connects customer identities, interactions, transactions, policies, journeys, and operational systems into a unified understanding. Traditional CX architecture, designed for linear, human-driven routing, falls short when it comes to managing real-time data flows between autonomous AI systems, data lakes, and human workers.
"Today’s operational complexity is no longer about adding more intelligence," Anand explains. "It’s about coordinating the existing intelligence across the enterprise so that the enterprise customer never experiences friction due to internal silos. This requires a shared context layer that enables AI systems, applications, and people to operate from the same understanding of the customer and business."
Shifting Priorities: Automation to Orchestration
As this coordination issue intensifies, Anand observes a strategic shift within enterprises from automation to orchestration as the top CX priority.
"Automation solves individual tasks, whereas orchestration connects them into end-to-end outcomes," he says. "The next evolution is context-aware orchestration, where AI agents, applications, and human workers operate using a shared understanding of customers, processes, and business intent rather than isolated system records."
With the proliferation of bots, agents, and AI tools, managing them becomes increasingly intricate. Anand emphasizes that competitive advantage now lies not in deploying automation but in how intelligently systems hand off tasks, collaborate, and escalate.
Avoiding the Pitfall: Bolting AI onto Legacy Systems
Companies that simply place a voice AI agent in front of an existing system risk replicating the same old problems. Instead of enhancing the experience, they may inadvertently recreate the deterministic phone menus AI was intended to replace. The true value of AI lies in its potential for scale, speed, and orchestration.
Anand points out the consolidation trend within the industry, with established contact center providers acquiring AI-native firms to bridge capability gaps and bolster their customer experience offerings. This shift underscores a growing awareness that enterprises require more than channels and automation; they need an intelligence layer capable of orchestrating AI, people, data, and workflows across the business.
The ultimate goal is to make AI the connective fabric between customers, employees, and enterprise systems. To achieve this, organizations are increasingly embracing a common enterprise ontology—a shared business vocabulary that aligns customer data, products, policies, standard operating procedures (SOPs), transactions, and workflows across disconnected platforms.
Tata Communications offers its Interaction Fabric as a solution, an orchestration layer designed to unify contact centers, messaging, collaboration, AI, and more.
