Operational Architecture

What the hiring-AI reckoning reveals about every scoring system, including the one running your contact centre. William Rochelle asked the question that started this, plainly, in a recent piece: what if the job you applied for never existed? It is a good question, and behind it sits a mechanism worth following, first through hiring, where it is finally getting attention, and then onto a contact centre floor, where I have spent twenty-six years watching the identical failure r

The BPO industry is debating whether to sell outcomes. It has not worked out how to prove who caused them. In the fourth quarter of its 2025 financial year, Concentrix wrote off USD 1,523.3 million of goodwill. The trigger was not a lost client, a failed integration or a collapse in demand. The company's own release attributes the charge primarily to the trading range of its share price and market capitalisation. In the same twelve months, revenue grew 2.2 percent to USD 9,82

Updated July 2026. This article was first published in May 2026 against Version 1.0 of our sector deep-dive. The underlying report has since been through an external verification pass and reissued as Version 2.0, with nine substantive corrections and a published revision register. Three figures in the original article have changed, one section has been materially expanded, and one claim has been qualified. The changes are summarised at the end. We have left the original argum

Why contact centres are the test case for PwC's two-track thesis, and why the track is a decision, not a destiny PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, drawn from over a billion job advertisements, makes an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. AI is not eliminating jobs at the rate the forecasts promised. It is splitting them. Some roles are being “Professionalised”. AI absorbs the routine tasks and leaves the human with the harder, more expert work. Others are being D

Why your AI oversight layer has a failure rate, and why nobody is measuring it A large enterprise recently described its AI hiring system to the press. The system screens hundreds of thousands of applicants a year and recommends a shortlist. Human recruiters then review those recommendations before anyone is hired. To demonstrate that humans remained in control, the organisation offered a statistic: Recruiters hire around 85 per cent of the candidates the AI recommends. That

The customer experience (CX) landscape in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) is undergoing a major structural transformation. For years, the default corporate playbook was offshore outsourcing to developing markets. Today, that pendulum has swung decisively backward. Major domestic brands, including Telstra, Optus, Origin Energy and Westpac, have re-shored their core voice queues to reclaim operational control through onshore, captive in-house networks. With captive in-house o

How smaller, agile operations can eliminate guesswork and scale performance without six-figure software contracts. In the small to medium contact centre space (sub-150 seats), workforce management (WFM) is frequently a game of survival. While massive enterprise operations deploy dedicated data science teams and hyper-expensive software suites to balance their staffing, mid-market centres are forced to make a brutal choice: rely on basic, rigid spreadsheets, or manage schedule

Contact centre performance has always been measured through a small set of familiar metrics. These have been foundational for decades and have continued to remain the bedrock on how centres are managed, especially in moments of contact centre stress. At the centre of that model is one of the most common measures in service operations: Average Handling Time (AHT). AHT made sense in a world where the main challenge was volume. If people were handling more calls, faster handlin

In complex operations, there is an unspoken rule: if you aren't actively building a strong foundation, the system will slowly slide into chaos. In a high-volume contact centre, this breakdown doesn't happen overnight. It shows up in small, frustrating ways—a second of lag on an agent's desktop, a slight delay in multi-channel routing, or a growing gap between what your technology promises and what your team can actually deliver. For over 26 years, I have held senior leadershi