Verint Unveils Agent Factory for the Era of Mixed Human and AI Workforces

Verint has launched Agent Factory, a new AI orchestration environment unveiled at Engage 2026 in Las Vegas, billed as a single environment where enterprises can put human staff and AI agents to work side by side rather than running them through separate systems. The platform arrives as the contact centre industry shifts from treating AI agents as experimental add-ons to recognising them as active participants in day-to-day operations, a change that exposes a gap in how most workforce systems were originally built. Traditional scheduling and performance tools were designed around human shifts and human metrics, not software that works continuously and learns over time.

Verint frames the launch around AI projects that work in isolation, bolted onto existing systems rather than woven into the workflows and teams that would let them deliver real value. Agent Factory is pitched as the fix, offering tools to design and orchestrate prebuilt and custom agentic AI agents, centralise prompt management, plug into multiple AI models, and apply governance controls across the wider Verint CX Automation Platform.

Jaime Meritt, Verint’s Chief Product Officer, explained: “Agent Factory helps enterprises put hybrid workforce orchestration into practice. Customers can build their own agentic AI agents, use them alongside Verint AI agents and route work to humans when needed.” Meritt concludes: “The result is a more coordinated workforce focused on outcomes you can measure, not just capabilities you can demo.”

Verint is treating AI agents as workforce assets in their own right, sitting alongside the people they work with rather than running underneath them as background automation. That reflects a shift from building AI agents to managing them at scale.

A contact centre built on human agents, AI copilots and autonomous AI agents raises questions that automation projects alone never had to answer. Vendors have begun drawing sharper lines between these categories, but the harder challenge is making them work as one team. Which tasks should AI handle outright, and which should stay with people? When should an agent escalate rather than push forward? How is performance measured fairly across a team that includes both software and staff? And how does a workforce planner forecast capacity when part of that capacity is not a person who can be rostered, but a system that can be spun up or down?

These sit firmly in workforce management, and they are exactly what most contact centres have never had to plan for. Designing workflows that route work intelligently between humans and machines, rather than simply layering AI on top of existing processes, is fast becoming its own discipline.

Verint is not the only vendor wrestling with this. Strip away the marketing language and most major CX platforms are already moving in the same direction. Salesforce tends to frame the problem as governing and orchestrating large numbers of AI agents, with multi-agent orchestration within Agentforce and agent lifecycle management dominating its narrative; humans are present, but the story centres on managing the agent layer. Microsoft talks in similar terms of multi-agent systems and human-agent collaboration, with people generally cast as supervisors rather than the headline. ServiceNow's AI control tower treats humans, systems and agents as parts of one workflow without making the mixed workforce itself the centrepiece.

Verint's heritage sets it apart from that group. Where Salesforce and Microsoft built outward from agent platforms, Verint comes from workforce management, quality monitoring and contact centre operations, and it frames the problem accordingly: enterprises now have a workforce that includes humans and AI. It would overstate the case to suggest Verint has spotted a challenge its rivals have missed, since Agentforce, Copilot Studio and the AI Control Tower all point the same way. It would be fair to say, however, that Verint is among a smaller field of CX vendors to emphasise workforce-management concepts to AI agents rather than agent-management ones, helping to distinguish it from the increasingly crowded battle for the AI layer.

What Verint is really betting on is that its workforce-management heritage gives it a more palatable way into a fight the rest of the industry is already having. Framing AI agents as colleagues rather than infrastructure sits comfortably with the wider consensus that human oversight remains essential to responsible AI deployment, even as the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and ServiceNow work towards comparable solutions. As AI agents become embedded within customer operations, the enterprises that pull ahead may be the ones that take proactive steps to manage a mixed human and AI workforce, rather simply layering AI on top of existing workforce management processes.