Longoria does not think AI will push support to the edge of the business. "AI isn't removing customer support from the business. It's forcing it to mature," he wrote in his New Year post. In the same post, noting what he was hearing from other support leaders, he said AI "exposes unclear ownership, weak escalation paths, and fragmented tooling faster," and that "Tier 1 is becoming architecture," with people working above it.
In August he put it more simply. "If your culture, leadership, and processes are strong, AI will amplify them. If they aren't, AI will expose every gap," he wrote, adding that the conversation "needs to be bigger than copilots, automation, and agentic AI. It needs to be about how we lead."
He also asks leaders to remember what customers have learned to expect. "We teach customers how to interact with us," he wrote in mid-August. Taking a channel away may solve an operational problem, but "the customer doesn't know about our operational problem." His advice: "understand the behavior we've created before we decide to change it."
Joining Enseo, he said, "feels a little like coming home," a return to the kind of technology you can "see, touch, install, troubleshoot." He told Counsel Collective that his first job there is "listening before I change anything," and that forward, for him, "means keeping customer care human while the tools around it keep changing."
In October he spent a week working night shifts alongside one of his support teams. He wrote that week that "there is no easy path to excellence in customer support." "My job is to make their work easier, so they can keep doing the same for the people they serve every day."
The lesson for BPO leaders is a practical one. Before buying another dashboard or bot, ask what it gives back to your team leads in time, and whether they will spend that time coaching.
AI helped draft this article. The BPO.AI editorial desk reviewed and edited it, and checked every fact against its original source.
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