July 16, 2025

Genesys AI Studio and AI Guides: Taming Agentic AI for the Contact Center

The concept of agentic AI—autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and act on our behalf—has rapidly moved from science fiction to the top of enterprise technology roadmaps. While the potential is immense, the risks associated with governance, trust, and predictability have kept many organizations in a state of cautious observation. Now, contact center leader Genesys is making a significant move to bridge that gap.

This blog overviews the recent announcement of Genesys Cloud AI Studio and offers our analysis of its impact on the customer experience market.

Why Did Genesys Announce AI Studio and AI Guides?

On June 25, 2025, Genesys introduced Genesys Cloud AI Studio, a centralized platform for building and managing AI, and its first major capability, AI Guides. This announcement directly addresses the primary challenge holding back the next wave of AI adoption in customer service: control. Today’s virtual agents often operate on rigid, pre-defined scripts that are brittle and require technical expertise to create. Agentic AI promises more fluid, intelligent, and independent action, but that very independence creates significant governance risk.

Genesys is tackling this problem head-on. AI Guides provides a no-code interface, allowing business users—not just developers—to design and deploy more autonomous virtual agents using natural language. The system is designed to guide these agents with clear, configurable guardrails. This allows the AI to handle complex, multi-step customer journeys that might involve connecting to back-office systems, but within a framework of safety controls that govern accuracy, tone, and policy compliance. By building on a model-agnostic architecture, Genesys also ensures it can adapt to the best-performing large language models (LLMs) over time.

Analysis: More Than Just a Feature, It’s a Governance Framework

The introduction of Genesys Cloud AI Studio is more than a product release; it represents a strategic pivot toward enabling governed autonomy. While the market is buzzing with the potential of agentic AI, Genesys is focusing on the pragmatic reality of enterprise adoption. The most significant aspect of this announcement is not the “agentic” capability itself, but the emphasis on the “guardrails” needed to deploy it responsibly.

This positions Genesys as a provider of pragmatic, enterprise-ready AI. By prioritizing a no-code environment with built-in safety controls, Genesys is directly addressing the issue that business leaders who cite trust and ethics as major barriers to AI adoption. This move effectively shifts the conversation from “what if AI could do anything?” to “how can we safely empower AI to do more?”

From an Aragon Research perspective, this forces competitors to clarify their own strategies for AI governance. Simply offering powerful models will no longer be enough. Vendors will need to provide a clear framework for control, safety, and business alignment. Genesys is establishing a baseline for responsible agentic AI in the contact center, a move that will likely pressure others in the market to articulate their own approach to taming the technology for enterprise use.

Bottom Line

Genesys’s announcement of AI Studio and AI Guides marks a positive step in the evolution of the AI-powered contact center. The company is providing a foundational platform designed to make agentic AI easier to deploy, but also safe and accessible for the enterprise. The core value proposition is the fusion of no-code accessibility with robust, configurable guardrails.

For enterprises, this means the era of semi-autonomous customer service is no longer a distant vision; it is a planned reality with a clear path to deployment. The key takeaway is that successful adoption will depend less on the technology itself and more on the strategic groundwork done beforehand.

UPCOMING WEBINAR

Trends in Corporate Learning: AI Assistants are Here (to Help)

Learning is still a challenge for enterprises. However, the challenge does not end with training employees. In the age of AI, Learning Assistants can help to train people in a variety of ways, and they can also serve as a knowledge base for training AI Agents. In this webinar, Jim Lundy discusses the latest trends in Learning and why the race for outcomes is still the biggest challenge managers face. Key things being covered:

What are the key trends driving learning, and what is the role of the LMS and Learning Content?
What are AI Assistants, and how are they impacting Learning?
What role do AI Coaches play in the race to better outcomes?
How can enterprises gain a competitive advantage by changing how they train?

Genesys AI Studio and AI Guides: Taming Agentic AI for the Contact Center