A business process outsourcer (BPO), LiveOps recently debuted LiveNexus, an innovation lab geared toward helping organizations safely prototype AI-led customer experience solutions such as AI-assisted agent support, smarter self-service and other types of automation.
No Jitter spoke with Molly Moore, COO at LiveOps, about what LiveOps does, what trends they’re seeing in the broader BPO space and how LiveNexus works. In an email follow-up to this conversation, LiveOps provided an overview of how they work with clients in developing a LiveNexus pilot program. The following is an abridged version of how they set pilot goals and validate progress:
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In the first 30 days: Does AI remove friction in the workflow for agents, teams or customers? If adoption happens naturally because it makes interactions easier or decisions faster, that’s a strong indicator. If adoption requires constant reminders or supervision, that’s treated as an early warning.
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We watch operational drag: In pilots that scale well, issues surface early but are straightforward to fix. In pilots that don’t, success depends on manual checks, constant tuning, or a few people quietly holding it together. That pattern shows up across CX, back office, and compliance use cases — and it never scales.
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After nearly 60 days: The initiative should behave like part of the operating model, not an experiment. Quality, compliance and customer outcomes should be stable, and ownership should be clear. If we see downstream rework, inconsistent experiences or governance questions being deferred, we slow down.
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By around 90 days: Would we be comfortable extending this experience across programs, channels or volumes with the same controls in place? If yes, we scale. If not, we refine or stop. In our experience, the fastest way to lose trust in AI-driven CX is scaling something that only works because people are compensating for it.
The following Q&A was edited for length.
No Jitter (NJ): What does LiveOps do?
Molly Moore (Moore): We have traditionally been a gig-focused CX provider, outsourcing contacts in our solutions, leveraging independent contractors. We have over 20,000 independent contractors across the country. So, scale is one component we provide to clients.
Our profile skews to people who are more experienced, such as stay-at-home parents or folks who maybe had been in the workforce and decided to take a break and then come back, as well as disabled individuals and people in rural communities who maybe don’t have access to good career opportunities. These are people who really want to work. When they show up, they’re energized and ready. They’re working from their own space. They’re not tied to a desk.
We also provide variability. In retail, for example, you might go from needing 1,000 agents in July to 10,000 agents in December. We’re seeing more and more variability in a week or even a day – Monday mornings are really heavy, so I staff for 100 people. But why would I pay for those 100 people on Friday afternoon when my volume is so different? We can scale up and down really fast, literally within an hour.
NJ: What trends are you seeing in the BPO space?
Moore: I sit on the CCW advisory board, so I hear from many large brands on their pain points. I’m not an expert, but on the AI front, and from a BPO perspective, the feedback from brands is that BPOs need to make a change and leverage more technology and consultancy around technology.
If I’m a head of CX, I can talk to different AI tool providers and figure out who to bring in on my own. I don’t necessarily need my BPO for that. What brands would like is for the BPOs to provide an end to end, orchestrated solution that solves their problems. CX providers [might roll out] an AI translation tool or [the like], but they have no idea how to orchestrate that across all the different data sets in a live environment.
We’re also hearing that personalization is a key component to success for brands today. So how do you simplify, streamline, drive data insights, etc., to deliver that. And then secondarily, they’re looking to get to conversion more quickly. That might be getting a patient their answer or selling an athletic shoe, but [it’s about] accelerating that time to conversion. Third, it’s about harnessing data and technology for better decision making.
Those three things are what drove us to launch LiveNexus, and we intend to become a technology service provider – not that we’ll stop staffing CX. I don’t think humans will go away anytime soon, because there’s still that massive need for empathetic agents who can have a conversation, particularly in more complicated industries like healthcare or insurance.
NJ: LiveOps ran a workshop at CCW in Orlando. Who attended?
Moore: It was the brands running contact centers. It’s a hard time to be a CX leader because they’re getting a lot of pressure around AI – it’s in the news every day and they’re pressured to do something with AI. Maybe they’ve done a couple pilots, but they didn’t scale those pilots in the right way and they were unsuccessful. They’re unable to measure the value of ROI. Around 36% of the people in the room said that they don’t have a written AI strategy in place – how can you possibly be successful there?
What we’re hearing is organizations don’t have clear ownership and governance to support scaling. They don’t have cross-team alignment. A lot of companies have viewed AI as a technology initiative. It should absolutely not be technology. It should be driven by the different operational departments with technology support, and we’ve got to help clients see that it’s the business problems that they should be solving.
NJ: You mentioned cross-team cooperation. Did that not exist prior to the introduction of AI? Now, with how fast AI is moving, what’s really been exposed is the lack of coordination as a problem that needs fixing?
Moore: I think it goes back to what I said earlier, which is that AI has been living under the technology team in many organizations. That’s not where it should be. It should be just like any other initiative that an organization might have. It should have a senior leadership team that is developing the strategy: “We understand the different outcomes we want to drive. We understand what the core business problems are. We identify where the friction points are across the entire client journey related to CX, and we attack and solve those.”
When we begin to engage with a client for LiveNexus, that’s the first thing we do. We map out the client journey. It’s all very different, depending on the industry, but we identify those core friction points. Then we decide on a very contained proof of concept, but we leverage real data.
LiveNexus allows CX leaders to come up with a proof of concept in a safe environment with live, real data outside of their operation, day to day operations. Typically, we can show value in 60 to 90 days. And typically that value has an outcome we want to hit, like cost containment for example.
NJ: Can you go into a little more detail on what is LiveNexus?
Moore: It’s an innovation engine that allows our clients to test different tools, technology and automation outside of their operational environment, with or without their data, depending on what they want to do. We can anonymize the data and give the CX leaders a safe place with which to test and then scale it.
For example, one of our clients pays high end nurses to take phone calls because that’s how they’ve always done it and it’s been a requirement. What they haven’t really done is assessed what parts of those journeys do not require that nurse – that expensive resource – to be there, and can they leverage AI in different points along that customer journey, and then, in an automated way, bring the nurse in when it’s required. That not only helps the patient solve their problem, but it’s also a retention component to the nurse who’s on the phone because they’re not using their time to answer noncomplex questions.
NJ: So, if I’m a customer and I want to generative AI-based summarization of the call to speed up the agents after call work, that’s something I could come to you for?
Moore: It might be agent assist type activities. It might be onboarding of new agents and making them more successful sooner. It might be ideas around how to find new agents more quickly. It can be internal efficiencies or customer facing or anything in between. We work with clients to scope exactly what they’re trying to accomplish. We’ll make it time bound. We’ll bring in their data, and we’ll help them figure out which tools and we’ll provide the orchestration of those different.
