Connecting customers to the right expert has been a goal of the contact centre industry for decades. Vendors have long marketed concepts such as SME routing, expert connect, swarming and enterprise-wide routing, each promising to link a customer directly with whoever is best placed to solve their problem. The vision was always appealing. The difficulty was never the idea itself, but making it work reliably at scale. 8x8 believes AI may finally make that possible.
Why enterprise-wide routing has been so difficult
Traditional routing depends on manually maintained skills profiles. Organisations must define skills, queues, workflows and agent capabilities, then keep updating them as the business changes. As companies grow, these systems become harder to maintain, while expertise itself shifts constantly as people change roles or build new experience. According to 8x8's announcement, most existing routing systems queue rather than truly route, assigning agents based on skills that are entered manually, rarely updated, and calibrated to who is available rather than who is genuinely best suited to a particular customer. Employees outside the contact centre are rarely included in that picture at all, since their skills are seldom tracked with any consistency.
8x8's approach: let the system discover expertise
8x8 AI Routing attempts to remove that manual burden by having the system build skills profiles itself. The platform analyses interaction transcripts, history and sentiment to suggest skills and proficiency levels for each agent, with administrators able to accept or adjust those assignments, and the engine continuing to reanalyse ongoing work to recommend further changes for review. Teams can pilot the system on a single queue before a full rollout, and supervisors can pull exportable audit trails showing why each interaction was routed to a particular resource, including confidence scores and the rationale behind the decision.
Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, believes this has been a long-standing bottleneck for the technology: “AI-powered routing has long promised a lot, but vendors have largely failed to address one key challenge: automatically assigning and maintaining agent skills and proficiency levels”. She added that the more significant capability is the system's ability to assess each inbound interaction and determine who across the entire enterprise, not just the contact centre, is best equipped to resolve the customer's intent.
The innovation, then, sits less in the act of routing itself and more in automating the discovery and upkeep of expertise that organisations have struggled to track manually, while keeping a documented, auditable trail of how each routing decision was made.
Beyond the contact centre
8x8 argues that the best person to resolve a customer's issue may well sit outside the contact centre altogether, in billing, customer success, technical teams or back-office functions. Its routing engine is designed to evaluate expertise across all of these areas simultaneously, connecting to 8x8 Contact Center, 8x8 Engage and 8x8 Work alike rather than treating the contact centre as a self-contained unit.
Hunter Middleton, 8x8's Chief Product Officer, said "the routing problem has always been about architecture", with most systems never designed to look beyond their own boundaries. He continued: “8x8 AI Routing was built differently, spanning all teams and boundaries in the business simultaneously and evaluating the full range of available resources in real time.”
8x8 has also applied similar coordination logic to frontline and deskless workers through its Resolve platform, suggesting the company sees expertise and information routing as a problem that extends well beyond the traditional contact centre. This reflects a broader shift in customer service thinking, from managing queues towards orchestrating expertise dynamically across the whole enterprise.
Problem solved?
Enterprise-wide routing is not a new idea. What is new is the claim that AI can automatically identify experts, maintain their profiles and match customer intent to expertise without extensive manual administration. If 8x8 can deliver on that promise, it may help solve one of the scalability challenges that has limited expertise-based routing for years.