Editorial
eBook
Designing an AI-Native Contact Center
There’s something deeply backwards happening in AI right now.
We’re spending real money on AI agents — automation systems that can write, decide, act and execute — and then immediately being told we need to buy another product to make sure those agents don’t do something reckless, non-compliant or flat-out stupid.
That should feel odd. Because it is.
I can’t think of many products where the default assumption is: this thing might go off the rails unless you buy extra software to babysit it. We don’t buy cars and then get told, “Oh, by the way, you’ll need to add seatbelts yourself.” Safety is built in. If it isn’t, the product isn’t done.
AI, apparently, gets a pass.
This Isn’t Antivirus Software
People love to make the antivirus comparison. “We always had to add protection later.” But that analogy falls apart fast.
You didn’t need antivirus software for a computer to function. You needed it to protect against external threats. With AI agents, the threat is often the agent itself — hallucinations, policy violations, data leakage, unintended actions. The list, as they say, is long and distinguished.
That’s not protection. That’s structural instability and, frankly, product malpractice.
If your product requires a third-party guardrail to be safe under normal operating conditions, the product is unfinished, unsafe and, frankly, unacceptable.
Related Article: AI Governance Isn’t Slowing You Down — It’s How You Win
The Guardrail Gold Rush
The fact that an entire category of “AI guardrails” exists should tell us something.
There are now enterprise platforms whose sole job is to stop AI agents from doing what AI agents naturally do when left unchecked. Companies like Virtue AI, Dynamo AI, Credo AI, NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails and IBM Watsonx.
None of these companies exist because AI vendors wanted them to; rather, enterprises realized — often too late — that “trust us” is not a safety strategy, nor is safety even baked into existing AI products.
The Core Problem No One Wants to Admit
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most AI agents today are optimized for capability, not containment. For “giving you more” instead of “what you want.”
We’re shipping systems that are incredibly good at generating output and incredibly bad at understanding consequences. Instead of slowing down to build safety and compliance into the core product, the industry shrugged and said, “We’ll fix it in post.”
Post, in this case, is your budget and your reputation.
And yes, safety is hard. Alignment is hard. Regulation is messy. But difficulty doesn’t excuse outsourcing responsibility.
It’s vital now, more than ever, that some sort of regulations get passed so that at least there are some rules to follow in the wild west of AI.
Related Article: How to Prepare for Ethical and Legal AI Use
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This Is a Product That’s Half-Baked
When customers have to stack tools just to make your product safe, that’s not an ecosystem — that’s a warning sign. AI doesn’t need more wrappers. It needs better foundations. Guardrails shouldn’t be an upsell. Compliance shouldn’t be an integration. Trust shouldn’t be modular.
Until those things are true, enterprises will keep paying twice: once for the AI, and once to keep it from embarrassing them.
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