Contact center digital transformation

Every contact center leader faces the same impossible choice: modernize and risk breaking what works, or protect stability and watch competitors pull ahead.

The pressure is real. Deloitte Digital reports that 72% of enterprises are actively upgrading their contact center infrastructure between 2024 and 2025. Gartner found that 85% of customer service leaders plan to pilot conversational AI this year. The market is moving.

But so is the fear. Legacy on-prem systems represent years of investment, customization, and hard-won stability. The horror stories of failed migrations, budget overruns, and careers derailed by ambitious transformation projects are well known. Nobody wants to be the leader who broke the contact center trying to fix it.

Here's what's changed: staying put is no longer the safe choice. The question isn't whether to transform. It's how to transform without betting everything on a single transition.

The real problem: legacy infrastructure can't support what's next

The conversation usually starts with AI. Contact centers need conversational AI, voice agents, real-time analytics. Leadership sees the demos, approves the pilots, and then everything stalls.

Why? Because legacy infrastructure wasn't built for this.

Latency kills the experience. Conversational AI needs sub-300ms response times to feel natural. When voice traffic routes through your data center, hits an external AI provider, processes, and returns, you're looking at 1200ms or more. That pause makes every AI interaction feel robotic. Customers notice.

Carrier complexity multiplies. Your existing carrier contracts, SIP trunks, and routing logic weren't designed for AI-driven call flows. Adding intelligent routing means building bridges between systems that don't want to talk to each other. Every integration point becomes a potential failure point.

Provider lock-in becomes painful. The AI landscape shifts constantly. Six months ago, one speech-to-text provider led accuracy benchmarks. Today, another does. When your infrastructure hardcodes dependencies on specific providers, switching means months of re-integration work.

Scaling hits walls. On-prem infrastructure scales by buying more hardware. AI workloads are spiky and unpredictable. You either over-provision (expensive) or under-provision (degraded experience during peaks).

This is why so many AI pilots succeed in controlled environments and fail in production. The AI works. The infrastructure doesn't.

The hybrid path: how leaders are actually doing this

The organizations making progress share a common approach: they stopped asking "cloud or on-prem?" and started asking "how do we build new capabilities without tearing down what works?"

The answer is parallel infrastructure.

Keep existing systems running. Your current contact center handles millions of interactions. It has routing logic refined over years. Agents know how to use it. Don't touch it until you're ready.

Build new capabilities alongside. Modern cloud infrastructure for AI workloads, programmable voice for new call flows, API-based carrier connections that bypass legacy complexity. Run them in parallel with your existing systems.

Migrate progressively. Start with new use cases: after-hours AI agents, overflow handling, specific customer segments. Prove the new infrastructure works before moving critical workloads. Each successful migration builds confidence for the next.

Replace carriers on your timeline. This is where most transformations get stuck. Legacy carrier contracts, manual provisioning processes, and SIP trunk dependencies create drag. API-based carrier infrastructure lets you replace these piece by piece, porting numbers and routes when contracts allow, not when a migration deadline demands it.

The State of Contact Centres 2025 report found that 43% of CX leaders believe a hybrid model is the future. Among mid-sized companies, that number rises to 50%. They're not choosing between humans and AI, or between cloud and on-prem. They're building infrastructure that supports both, permanently.

What changes when infrastructure stops fighting you

Leaders who've made this transition describe a shift in what becomes possible.

AI that actually works in production. When voice traffic and AI processing happen on the same network, latency drops from seconds to milliseconds. Voice AI agents respond fast enough that callers can't tell they're talking to AI. The technology that impressed in demos finally delivers in production.

Freedom to choose the best AI providers. Modern infrastructure abstracts provider dependencies. When a better speech-to-text model emerges, you evaluate and adopt it in days. When a text-to-speech provider raises prices, you switch without rebuilding integrations. Your AI strategy isn't hostage to any single vendor.

Global consistency without global complexity. Customers in Sydney, Frankfurt, and New York all get the same experience quality. Infrastructure that performs consistently across regions eliminates the operational headaches of managing geographic variation.

Debugging that's actually possible. When something goes wrong with a packaged solution, you open a ticket and wait. With programmable Voice APIs, you can see every layer of the stack. You find problems faster. You build custom workflows that packaged solutions can't support.

Agents who can focus on what matters. When AI handles routine queries effectively, agents handle complex problems that need human judgment. Turnover drops. Customer satisfaction rises. The math finally works.

The decision point

Let's be honest about the risks.

Transformation projects fail. Budgets overrun. Timelines slip. Leaders who promised results get blamed when reality proves harder than expected. These concerns are legitimate.

But the math has shifted.

55% of contact centers increased their software budget in 2024 (CX Today). They're investing because standing still costs more than moving forward. Every year on legacy infrastructure means higher maintenance costs, fewer AI capabilities, and a widening gap to competitors who figured this out earlier.

The contact center industry will reach $113.8 billion by 2027 (CX Network). That growth goes to organizations that can deliver what customers expect. Legacy infrastructure makes that harder every year. Hybrid infrastructure makes it possible.

The safest path forward isn't avoiding transformation. It's transforming in a way that doesn't require betting everything on a single transition.

How Telnyx powers the hybrid transformation

Telnyx built its infrastructure for exactly this challenge: enabling contact centers to modernize without the risk of all-or-nothing migrations.

Full-stack programmable voice. Unlike platforms that only handle one piece of the puzzle, Telnyx provides the complete voice stack: carrier connectivity, call control, AI processing, and global numbers, all accessible through APIs. You control every layer without stitching together multiple vendors.

Voice AI Agents that perform in production. Telnyx runs AI inference on dedicated GPUs co-located with voice infrastructure across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. When a caller in Frankfurt talks to your AI agent, both voice and AI processing happen in Frankfurt. That's how you get ultra low latency that makes AI conversations feel natural.

Multi-provider AI flexibility. Access leading speech-to-text engines (Deepgram, Google Cloud Speech, Telnyx STT) and text-to-speech providers (Azure Neural, AWS Polly, Google Cloud TTS, Telnyx TTS) through a single API. When the AI landscape shifts, you shift with it, no re-integration required.

Global numbers and carrier replacement. Port existing numbers or provision new ones in 140+ countries. Replace legacy carrier contracts with API-based connectivity on your timeline. No more manual provisioning processes or SIP trunk dependencies holding back your transformation.

Programmable Voice APIs for complete control. Build exactly the call flows your business needs. Route intelligently between AI and human agents. Debug issues across the entire stack. Create experiences that packaged CCaaS solutions can't match.

Private network performance. Telnyx owns and operates a global IP network, so your voice traffic doesn't traverse the public internet. Consistent quality, lower latency, and reliability that contact centers depend on.

The hybrid path works when your infrastructure supports it. Telnyx gives you the programmable foundation to keep existing systems running while building what's next, migrating at your pace without breaking operations.