Avaya has announced that avatarin, a Tokyo-based robotics startup spun off from ANA Holdings, has selected Avaya Infinity to power its AI social robots across physical customer service environments. The deployment, which spans airline reservation desks, local government service counters and retail floors, brings contact centre technology off the screen and into the physical world.
The key purpose of the integration is to add vital context. Using Model Context Protocol (MCP), Avaya Infinity preserves and passes the real-time history of a customer interaction across channels, whether that customer has been speaking to a phone agent, using chat, or is now standing in front of an avatarin robot on a shop floor.
One Intelligence, multiple touchpoints
Akira Fukubari, Chief Executive Officer of avatarin, outlined its ambition of creating “‘One Intelligence’ where AI, robotics and contact centres function as a single unit” rather than separate systems. Fukubari also explained that it places a strong emphasis on AI that augments rather than replaces human capability: "By leveraging a hybrid model, we ensure that while AI handles scalability and responsiveness, human experts can continue to provide empathy, sophisticated decision-making, and complex problem-solving that customers demand.”
Avaya describes its own approach to that human-AI balance as "tandem care", a model in which agentic AI and human agents work in parallel across a carefully designed workflow. AI handles automation and context retrieval while humans retain ownership of complex or sensitive interactions. The tandem care capability within Avaya Infinity connects to enterprise systems, including billing and CRM via MCP, enabling real-time task execution alongside the human agent rather than in spite of them.
New platform capabilities
Avaya also announced several new features within Avaya Infinity. One brings together customer interaction data with enterprise data from CRM and ERP systems to surface not just what happened in a customer conversation, but why it happened too, and to recommend next actions based on that combined intelligence. Another, built on the open Delta Sharing standard, allows real-time contact centre interaction data to flow directly into the Databricks enterprise lakehouse without the need for traditional ETL processes, feeding broader AI initiatives across the business.
Physical AI: the next frontier
Avaya pointed to Deloitte's 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, which found global adoption of physical AI is projected to reach 80 percent by 2028. The Asia Pacific region is ahead of that curve with 71 percent of APAC organisations having already deployed robotics or autonomous systems, compared to 56 percent in both the Americas and EMEA. avatarin, itself an APAC-rooted company, is an early illustration of what that adoption looks like in a customer experience context.
For the CX industry, a significant question the partnership raises is one of scope. If contact centre platforms can now serve as the intelligence layer for physical robots operating in airports, government offices and retail floors, the definition of what a contact centre actually is may need revisiting.