AI Boosts Customer Experience at Federal Contact Centers

Emerging technologies like AI have played an outsized role in modernizing federal contact centers and improving customer interactions with agencies, federal tech officials said last week at the 2025 ACT-IAC Contact Center Annual Summit in Reston, Virginia.

Federal contact centers are often the front line of the customer service experience, answering key questions and connecting customers with critical services at federal agencies.

Labor Explores New AI Pilots

Tanya Slater Lowe, director of the Department of Labor’s National Contact Center, said her unit is deploying AI pilots in partnership with the private sector to automate parts of its operations.

“We are researching two different products, and we are actually making pretty good strides,” Lowe said. “We’re looking at Salesforce Agent[force], and we’re looking at some things that Google offers. We’re looking at how we can mix and match and put APIs together and maybe not put together.”

Lowe said that AI can automate responses to frequently asked questions for Labor, and escalate more complicated inquiries to human agents who can better respond to issues.

“We’ve got our top 10 inquiries. There’s no reason why we cannot have an agent just go through and answer those and even escalate,” Slater said. “No person has to touch it anymore. It’s escalated by AI and goes right to the state. That is such cost savings. It’s unbelievable.”

Despite the potential of AI, Lowe said the technology won’t replace jobs at Labor, but rather natural attrition will make some jobs obsolete and open the door for retained employees to upskill and use AI to complement their work.

“We’re not looking to let go of any agents,” Lowe said. “We are going to utilize natural attrition because we do know that once we implement the AI, we’re not going to need as many agents as we have, but natural attrition should be able to take care of that so that we’re not having to actually sever anyone from their jobs.”

Veterans Affairs Uses AI to Boost Efficiency

Catherine Cravens, executive director of multi-channel technology at the Veterans Experience Office at the Department of Veterans Affairs, told the audience that her unit — which oversees 20 enterprise-level contact centers around the country and handles more than 60 million calls annually — believes AI can help route veterans’ inquiries the right place and boost efficiency.

“Thinking about using AI as an opportunity to help folks get to the right agent [in] the most efficient way possible is a really great kind of thinking about our customers first,” Cravens said. “So, that’s a huge opportunity, even thinking about the way that we choose applications.”

While AI offers efficiency gains, the unique setup of each contact center makes broad technological changes difficult. A one-size-fits-all approach will not work for VA contract centers, according to Cravens.

“They’re all also managed by different executives, by different lines of business, by different budget, by different legislation,” Cravens said. “We really are working with disparate data in many cases, so we’re not able to necessarily find that holistic data set that’s going to lead us to how to make the most impactful change, other than by a center-by-center application.”

VA’s mission is driving AI use and implementation, Cravens said.

“What is the end that we’re looking for? Is this chat bot really going to help us, or is an AI agent? Is it going to make the experience better for our customer?” Cravens asked. “Taking that pause to be like, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I think is really, really important.”