🎙️Andy Thuemmel, AI Innovation, Transformation & Customer Support Leader, Foundever: The leaders winning in 2026 are those treating AI as a strategic capability that needs ongoing attention to strengthen existing operations

Outsourcing Today, the business services industry’s integrated networking and news platform, continues its interview series with leaders shaping the future of business services and related sectors. We explore key perspectives on the year ahead, strategic priorities, and growth opportunities.

Read below the key standpoints and perspectives of Andy Thuemmel, AI Innovation, Transformation & Customer Support Leader at Foundever:

Expertise Compounds AI Value

Aligning to our belief that AI is a tool to enable growth and human potential. To use that tool well, you need a deep understanding of the operational context it lives in and is solving for.

🎙️The AI-based technologies changing the competitive edge in 2026

AI is fundamentally reshaping how we deliver value at scale. Our competitive edge is people-led approach, technology-enabled approach, integrating human + AI workflows to power more seamless, scalable customer experiences and keep brand promises in every moment that matters. And, our operational experience means we know not just what can be done with the latest innovations, but how to ensure it is done and can deliver business impact.

We have already deployed our AI-powered agent copilot, EverAssist, to enable 50,000+ associates across 300+ clients so they are able to work smarter, not just faster. Agents are able to focus on complex, high-value interactions while the more routine tasks are streamlined and automated. The result: faster resolution times, better first-contact resolution rates, and measurable cost savings for our clients, while maintaining the empathy and brand voice the customers expect in their experience.

Our automated QA and conversational analytics tool, EverCoach, is another example of how we do this today. It analyzes 100% of customer interactions to identify coaching moments and performance opportunities across calls and digital conversations. This enables rich coaching and business insights that drive agent performance above industry benchmarks, creating tangible value for our clients.

The real edge: We’re amplifying human expertise globally, not replacing humans with AI – we’re creating stronger human workforces with AI.

🎙️What’s the biggest misconception business leaders still have about AI?

The biggest misconception is that AI is a “set it and forget it” solution.

Leaders often expect to deploy AI, flip a switch, and watch performance improve automatically. Reality is different. AI requires clear governance frameworks, continuous refinement and monitoring, human oversight and judgment, regular recalibration based on business outcomes, and operational context for successful deployment

The adoption of generative AI raises important considerations around fairness, avoiding bias, safeguarding against harmful outputs, and transparency about data usage—all of which reinforce why governance, ongoing monitoring and understanding of the contextual use case matter.

We’ve seen organizations invest heavily in AI tools, only to see adoption stall because they underestimated the change management piece. Successful AI deployment is 30% technology, 70% people and process, including culture, role evolution, training, and day-to-day ways of working.

The leaders winning in 2026 are those treating AI as a strategic capability that needs ongoing attention to strengthen existing operations, for AI to augment human talent, and turn insight into action to continuously improve outcomes – not as a one-time implementation.

🎙️About the AI-led business decisions

In practice, we use AI to inform and accelerate core operational decisions—while keeping human leaders accountable for the strategic calls, in three critical areas. For deployment prioritization, AI analyzes client readiness, technical configuration, and operational maturity to recommend sequencing for tool rollouts. This reduces implementation risk and accelerates ROI.

In terms of resource allocation, we use predictive analytics to match the right team members (and expertise) to client needs across regions, languages, and service types. This ensures faster, more effective support at scale.

For quality & performance scoring, Auto-QA continuously scores agent interactions, flagging coaching opportunities and identifying training needs. Quality decisions are increasingly data-driven, not opinion-based.

Overall, the pattern is that we use AI where data volume is high, pattern recognition matters, and speed adds value. Human leaders make the strategic calls on what these insights mean for our business, for operational efficiency and our clients.

🎙️The impact of AI on customers’ expectations

Customers now expect three things, and we deliver these through people-led, AI-enhanced integrations.

When it comes to ease of implementation, customers want AI that works immediately, not after months of setup. The baseline expectation is now minimal disruption and maximum speed. Our deployment model enables tools to go live in weeks and our operational expertise is what allows us to help clients realize impact fast.

On complete security, AI means data at scale. Customers demand absolute confidence that their data and their customers’ data is protected. We embed security and compliance into every layer, so clients can deploy without compromise (supported by enterprise-grade standards and certifications).

In terms of measurable results at accessible cost, customers expect impact fast, without premium pricing. They want a clear ROI: efficiency gains, cost reduction, quality improvement. At Foundever, we integrate AI into our core service model, making these tools standard, not add-ons.

Overall, the shift is that customers no longer see AI as experimental or luxury. It’s table stakes and they expect it to be value-driven, secure and fast. We’re winning because we deliver AI as part of a seamless experience ecosystem that enhances human connection and builds brand and business momentum quickly, efficiently and effectively when deployed.

🎙️Staying differentiated in the market

We combine people, insight and optimized use of technology to deliver more from existing CX and we do it with global scale, deep operational expertise, and proven innovation. Our differentiation rests on three interlocking advantages.

When it comes to global scale + local expertise, for more than 30 years we have learned and developed expertise through 130,000+ associates in 45 countries, operating in 60+ languages. Few players can match this breadth while maintaining operational consistency. We can deploy, scale, and adapt faster than anyone else.

On the integrated AI ecosystem side, we have developed EverTech, our purpose-built technology ecosystem so that third party technologies, proprietary CX-focused tools like EverAssist and EverCoach, and foundational digital capabilities like analytics seamlessly work together, not as separate silos, in our CX solutions. This creates compounding value: one tool improves agent capability, another measures impact and a third recommends next steps. Performance gets better over time, not just faster in the moment – our technology is built to grow with our client’s needs.

When it comes to the ethical AI framework, we embed governance into our deployment approach, including transparency and ongoing monitoring. Clients trust us because we’re transparent about AI limitations, bias mitigation, and human oversight. Trust is our competitive moat that protects brand integrity and customer trust. And it means we are a true partner in solving real problems together, building a stronger and better performing CX capability fit for each client.

🎙️Balancing rapid innovation with responsible and ethical AI use

Security and responsibility aren’t bolted on after innovation. They’re baked into everything we build from day one.

By default, every solution undergoes rigorous security and legal review before deployment. We align to industry certifications and compliance requirements (including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, among others) to ensure our tools protect PII and sensitive data like card details. All data is encrypted at rest and in transit—no exceptions.

Critically, client data never trains our models. Ever. Your data stays yours.

Why this matters is that when security and compliance are your foundation, not an afterthought, innovation becomes naturally responsible. We don’t ask “How do we make this secure?” after building it. We ask “How do we innovate within these guardrails?” from the start, while also addressing ethical considerations like bias, fairness, and transparency to protect customer trust and brand integrity.

The result is fast innovation that doesn’t compromise trust. Our clients can adopt our tools with confidence because responsibility is omnipresent at the core, not an add-on feature.

🎙️Technologies trending now

One key technology trend businesses should be paying attention to now is analytics + automation orchestration with agentic AI. AI gets the headlines, but the real competitive edge in 2026 comes from connecting three capabilities: real-time analytics (seeing what’s happening now, not yesterday), intelligent automation (acting on those insights efficiently, with human oversight), agentic AI (autonomous agents executing interconnected tasks, creating a network effect of compounding value and built within real operational context to deliver value).

When the agent and agentic workforces work together, each completing tasks, passing context and learning from outcomes, the system becomes exponentially more powerful. One agent handles a customer inquiry; another surfaces relevant data; a third schedules follow-up and they all know when it’s time for the experience to be human. The compounding effect is remarkable, especially when applied to customer experience operations at scale. At Foundever we believe this is how we will deliver empathy at scale and what is at the heart of the strong, sustained relationships brands need to grow from.

The second trend is quantum computing. This is arriving faster than most realize. When quantum reaches scale, the multi-X compute power will take AI to levels we cannot fathom today. Organizations investing now in AI foundations—clean data, secure infrastructure, ethical frameworks, new ways of doing standard CX activities—will be best positioned to leap ahead when that inflection point hits. Those unprepared will struggle to catch up.

Businesses need to think in layers. Build responsibly today with connected analytics, automation and human-centered governance. Prepare infrastructure for tomorrow’s quantum leap. The winners in 2026 and beyond are those thinking and solving for both timeframes simultaneously.

Social Impact Differentiator

Beyond business metrics, Foundever.org extends our mission globally—funding education, digital skills training, and economic opportunity in underserved communities. This isn’t separate from our business; it’s foundational to how we think about responsible AI and inclusive growth.