How AI is elevating customer service from entry level to a long-term career path

So far, all the chatter around AI has been about it replacing humans in various roles, but we can make it work for us, says Harpo Lilja, CEO of customer service AI company Tugi Tark – and even better, we can use it for career advancement.

Customer service roles are traditionally seen as entry-level positions – soul-crushing, fraught with angry customers and impossible targets, and on top of that, management who knows that most people will only work in the role  for a short amount of time, making them consistently replaceable. 

To add to that, in recent years, the customer support agent has been replaced by chatbots, AI-prompt-filled phone lines and a bevy of increasingly angry reviews on TrustPilot by customers who feel frustrated at the lack of human interaction, and more importantly, a solution to their problem. 

We’re now firmly in the world where AI can assist with many of our tasks, especially with automating routine tasks – with that in mind, perhaps it’s time to redefine what it means to be a support professional?

At Tugi Tark, with our advanced AI agents seamlessly melding with human agents, it’s been a pleasure to watch support professionals evolve from reactive ticket handlers into strategic specialists who train AI, refine policy documentation, and maintain compliance standards. The role is becoming more valuable, not less.

Support team efficiency has shifted in a more interesting way, with human agents handling tickets based on their skillsets, rather than just more tickets.

It's not just changing how customer service agents work, it's reinventing their roles entirely. AI now handles the majority of routine inquiries instantly, so human agents spend their time on knowledge base and integration management. And when tickets are transferred from AI to human agents, it will be for cases that require more empathy – complex cases involving third-party escalations, and compliance oversight instead of answering the same questions repeatedly. 

More human value

Despite technological advancements, support teams are still weighed down by fragmented systems that force support agents to switch between multiple platforms. 

Traditional support models depend on large teams, manual processes, and multilingual staffing, all of which drive up costs and create long response times. Language barriers remain persistent, with operators hiring native speakers for every new market before they even know if that market will be profitable.

AI transforms this by automating routine inquiries and removing language barriers through real-time translation. Human agents remain essential, but their focus shifts to oversight, compliance, and empathy-driven cases. In iGaming, this creates a model that is faster, more scalable, and better aligned with player expectations.

Customer support teams are going through a reinvention of their roles. The key is to keep humans at the top of the chain: responsible for decision-making, updating policy documentation, fine-tuning tone of voice, and continuously training the AI agents to perform better.

The AI needs to know its limitations and hand it over to humans at the right time, ensuring players never need to get frustrated and shout, “Speak to a human!” into the ether. 

The key is that escalations happen seamlessly within one system, so there's no friction when AI hands off to a human. Human agents aren't disappearing; they're moving to the top of the value chain as strategic specialists who make AI effective at scale.