On the bustling trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Swapnil Jain, CEO and co-founder of Observe.AI, detailed a vision for the future of call centers that could transform the way millions interact with customer service every day. In an interview on NYSE Floor Talk with Judy Shaw, Jain outlined how artificial intelligence—notably, the new generation of VoiceAI—stands poised to upend entrenched challenges in customer care.

“Millions of people every single day, like you and me, call our favorite brands, call our telecom providers, call our banks for customer service—and every single time each of us come out very unhappy,” Jain said, pointing to the familiar frustrations of long hold times and circuitous transfers. “We help enterprises improve the customer experience they provide in their contact center while helping them reduce the cost.”

Observe.AI, founded eight years ago, has worked with over 300 enterprises as they navigate the shift toward AI-augmented contact centers. Jain’s optimism is grounded in statistics. “Just to give you an interesting fact… the average human spends about 43 days on hold with customer service,” he noted—underscoring not only the scale of the problem but the appetite for a better solution.

VoiceAI, Observe.AI’s latest launch, aims to automate the routine, repetitive queries that too often bog down human agents. Jain explains that, “tomorrow when you call your telco or your bank, you will talk to an AI machine that will really understand what you are saying, what’s your problem. It will be very humanlike, it will be very conversational and resolve your problem, so you don’t have to wait on hold to talk to a human agent.”

This approach, Jain argues, targets two perennial pain points: consumer dissatisfaction and operational cost. “Business doesn’t need to spend so much money necessarily in hiring a lot more human agents,” he added.

For Observe.AI’s clients, the impact is tangible. Take Accolade, a personalized healthcare company. Jain notes that Accolade uses Observe.AI’s VoiceAI agents to collect extensive information during the insurance claims process—information such as the customer’s name, member ID, and the nature of their inquiry. “They’ve automated that entire process… so now, when the call goes to a human agent, the human agent has all the context,” Jain said, emphasizing how AI can set up human agents for more successful, higher-value interactions.

In another example, Affordable Care, a dental healthcare provider, implemented a VoiceAI-powered agent named “Beth.” Jain highlighted, “Beth now handles 95% of their conversation. So every time you call in, you will be greeted with an AI agent called Beth that will resolve most of your queries and then the rest goes to a human agent.” The result? Faster access to care and improved resolution times for patients who might otherwise spend valuable minutes—or hours—waiting to speak with a human being.

For enterprises still weighing the advantages, Jain emphasizes the quick return on investment. “With VoiceAI the best thing is customers see ROI rather really quickly,” he observed, pointing out both cost savings and improvements to the client experience.

While the present is focused on streamlining voice and phone-based channels, Jain paints a broader canvas for the future of contact center automation. “I believe the future of contact center AI is multimodal…I imagine a world where it’s just not going to be about voice. It will include images, video,” he said. The implication: tomorrow’s customers might not just describe a problem—they could show it to their AI agent, who would use computer vision to diagnose and solve it on the spot.

For an industry long defined by script-driven, labor-intensive customer service, Jain’s outlook represents a radical departure. By fusing conversational AI with broader modalities—including images and video—the company aims to move beyond the limitations of voice menus and chatbots, offering customers a more empathetic, efficient route to resolution.

As exchanges like these become ever more routine on Wall Street and Main Street alike, the transformation of the call center may ultimately mark one of the most visible connections between AI innovation and everyday consumer experience. The opportunity, as Jain makes clear, is not merely about replacing human agents—but about augmenting them, equipping them, and fundamentally reshaping business-to-consumer relationships.