5 ways agentic AI can powerfully transform proactive engagement

Picture a world where AI agents can send customers perfectly timed, personalized messages on their preferred channel, alerting them to possible fraud or notifying them of utility service outages. Yes, proactive engagement has entered a new era.

For years, organizations relied on reactive strategies: waiting for customers to initiate a call, email, or chat with a question or concern. Then came proactive outreach - the ability to anticipate customer needs and reach out first to actively engage with customers and prospects. Adding AI and automation to the mix has elevated proactive outreach by reducing manual campaign setup, optimizing timing, orchestrating contacts, and more. In fact, according to Metrigy research, AI has become the leading tool for proactive outreach, overtaking manual human outreach for the first time.

The rise of agentic AI marks another significant evolution. Unlike traditional, non-agentic AI - which is limited to executing specific tasks, such as following preset rules, sending alerts, or offering recommendations - self-directed AI agents can reason, plan, and act autonomously. They don’t just suggest or notify; they can complete tasks end-to-end, managing entire workflows without human handoff unless escalation is required.

This autonomy drives employee satisfaction, as agentic AI handles many types of customer calls, provides timely information to resolve issues faster, identifies when agents need a break (and gives them permission to take one), leading to delivery of superior customer experiences. According to Metrigy, 55.3% of companies already use agentic AI for proactive interactions.

Figure 1: How does or will your company reach out proactively?
Metrigy, Customer Experience Optimization: 2025-26, September 26, 2025

This marks a dramatic pivot from just one year ago, when human-led outreach dominated. The question is no longer whether AI will transform proactive engagement, but how organizations can harness this transformation responsibly and effectively.

1. Creating adaptive conversations

Non-agentic AI relies on predefined triggers and rules – essentially, “If you ask me, I’ll respond” – and doesn’t act on its own initiative. It appears in the form of rule-based chatbots or virtual assistants, for example, which only reply when a user types something in, but don’t proactively reach out at the right time.

Agentic AI, on the other hand, operates with a degree of autonomy. It doesn’t simply respond to triggers; rather, it can:

• Perceive customer context and signals in real time
• Decide on the best course of action based on goals and guardrails
• Act autonomously across channels, initiating or adapting outreach
• Learn from results to continuously optimize future actions

The CX impact: Agentic AI with proactive outreach goes beyond scheduled email blasts, scripted SMSs, or omnichannel automated campaigns. It’s a new approach to engaging customers, with living, adaptive conversations that are tailored, timely, and outcome driven.

Let’s see how it would work in the utility outage and fraud prevention scenarios mentioned earlier.

Example 1: Service continuity

A utility company using agentic AI during a power outage can avoid blasting all its customers with the same generic SMS or email. Instead, the autonomous AI agent identifies which neighborhoods are affected, checks each customer’s preferred channel, and sends proactive, personalized updates: “Hi Alex, we’re aware of the outage in your area. Power is expected to be restored by 4:15 p.m. In the meantime, here are some safety tips.” If restoration takes longer than expected, the agent automatically follows up with a new update; and if a customer replies with concerns, the AI agent adapts and escalates to a live agent if needed.

Example 2: Fraud prevention

When unusual activity appears on a credit card, a traditional system might block the card and leave the customer frustrated. Agentic AI takes a smarter, customer-first approach. It evaluates the risk in real time and proactively reaches out on the customer’s chosen channel with a message like: “We noticed a $1,200 charge in Madrid. Was this you?” If the customer confirms fraud, then the AI locks the account, immediately issues a new virtual card, and notifies support. If the charge is legitimate, then the model adapts to reduce future false alarms.

These use cases demonstrate how agentic AI transforms proactive outreach from scripted, one-way messages into living, adaptive conversations. The common thread is timeliness, personalization, and autonomy: proactively engaging with customers at the right moment, through the right channel, with the right action, and managing entire workflows without human handoff.

2. Personalizing at scale

Consumers value personalized proactive outreach, but they also value clear boundaries. It must be delivered on their preferred channel (as 62.9% of consumers expect), feel friendly (40.5% want the right level of small talk), and provide real value - whether it’s alerting them to a sale (38.1%, preventing an issue, or sharing timely updates - without being intrusive). Consumers are comfortable receiving an average of up to 3.7 text messages per week, according to Metrigy’s exclusive new report, Driving Customer Engagement with AI and Proactive Outreach.

Metrigy: Driving Customer Engagement with AI and Proactive Outreach (Q3 2025)

Other Metrigy findings show that 52.6% of companies already use AI to personalize proactive outreach, with another 36.1% planning to do so. That means nearly nine in 10 organizations are either deploying or preparing to deploy AI-driven personalization at scale.

The CX impact: An impressive 81% of companies report improved customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) as the top benefit of proactive outreach. In addition, 65.6% cite efficiency gains from AI automating outreach schedules, channel selection, and personalization, and 61.2% have seen higher revenue from upsell, cross-sell, or retention campaigns.

Metrigy: Driving Customer Engagement with AI and Proactive Outreach (Q3 2025)

But all that is just the starting point. Agentic AI brings a new layer to personalization by moving beyond static customization to adaptive, autonomous, end-to-end engagement:

• Adaptive and thoughtful conversations: Agentic AI continuously interprets context, tone, and behavior to adjust interactions in real time.
• Autonomous prioritization: It doesn’t just schedule messages - it decides which customers to engage, when, and how, based on predicted outcomes like likelihood to churn, buy, or need support.
• Cross-journey orchestration: Agentic AI ensures continuity and consistent outreach across marketing, sales, and service. For example, if a customer declined an upsell yesterday, the agent won’t repeat it today, shifting the conversation to retention instead.
• Self-learning loops: Instead of waiting for humans to analyze reports, the system adapts instantly. If a fraud-prevention SMS template isn’t driving responses, for example, then the agentic AI rewrites it on the fly, independently, and tests alternatives.
• Proactive empathy: AI agents can detect emotional signals (confusion, frustration, disengagement) and adapt outreach with the right tone, escalating to human agents when empathy is critical.

Companies can’t afford to treat proactive engagement as optional. It’s becoming a competitive differentiator - and agentic AI is the lever that transforms personalization into truly adaptive, outcome-driven customer engagement.

3. Driving precision engagement

Aberdeen found leading firms tailor hyper-personalized communications and enhanced efficiency with AI to uplift proactive engagement results.

Companies have long used proactive outreach for appointment reminders and delivery notifications. Today, Metrigy found the use cases are expanding to include service exceptions, upsell opportunities, fraud alerts, and collections.

Metrigy: Driving Customer Engagement with AI and Proactive Outreach (Q3 2025)

The CX impact: Traditional, non-agentic AI improved campaign-level personalization, optimizing when and where messages were delivered. But agentic AI raises the bar: it analyzes the full customer context to orchestrate the entire engagement journey, adjusting conversations in real time. This moves personalization from static “insert name here” campaigns to living, adaptive interactions that feel genuinely individual, timely, and value driven.

4. Orchestrating across channels: Where AI agents meet customers

The top three channels for proactive outreach remain: email (69.1%), phone calls (46.1%), and SMS/text (43.3%). In-app chat (42.4%), social apps (40.5%), and business messaging apps (37.5%) are also rapidly gaining traction. Rich Communication Services (RCS) - the next-generation SMS - already accounts for 23.7% usage.

Metrigy: Driving Customer Engagement with AI and Proactive Outreach (Q3 2025)

The CX impact: Agentic AI thrives in multichannel environment. Unlike rule-based systems, which might be channel-specific, agentic systems can dynamically select and orchestrate across channels - switching from SMS to WhatsApp, or from voice to email - depending on customer preference, context, and response. Notably, Metrigy revealed that 42.8% of companies already use AI text agents for proactive outreach, and 33.4% use AI voice agents today. Within three years, those numbers will surpass 90% combined.

5. Building trust through compliance, ethics, and guardrails

According to Metrigy, 74.3% of companies already enforce stringent compliance controls in outbound campaigns, while another 23.8% want compliance features that some providers don’t yet offer.

The CX impact: Customers are more likely to respond when outreach is branded and compliant. For organizations, this means designing agentic systems that:

• Embed TCPA, FDCPA, and GDPR guardrails by default.
• Prioritize branded communication for trust and authenticity.
• Maintain human-in-the-loop oversight for sensitive decisions.

Trust is the cornerstone of modern CX, and with the right guardrails in place, organizations can turn compliance into confidence.

A strong foundation for AI transformation

You can’t enjoy the amazing benefits of AI transformation if your foundation is broken. As Forrester analysts explain, AI doesn’t automatically fix inefficiencies; it amplifies whatever you’ve already got going on, whether streamlined or chaotic. That’s why it’s critical to begin by assessing your current state: ensure processes are clearly defined, data governance makes information consistent and trusted, and employees can align with new technologies through strong change management, training, and enablement.

Once the basics are in order, though, AI-powered analytics can become the essential building block for proactive enablement success. For companies across various sectors, it generates insights, identifies opportunities, and drives personalized engagement at scale. Agentic AI takes this even further, with the ability to collect consumer insights in real time, reason across contexts, and act autonomously.

Together, AI-powered analytics and agentic AI form an intelligent engagement ecosystem. Analytics provides the intelligence, and the AI agent acts on it independently, turning data into real customer impact – faster and at scale.

• Instantly turn insights into action: When analytics detects churn risk, agentic AI launches a tailored omnichannel retention campaign adapted to each customer’s requirements, with no need for human handoff.
• Adapt dynamically: When analytics surfaces new customer behaviors, agentic AI adjusts outreach tone, channel, and timing on the fly.
• Close the loop: Agentic AI continuously feeds results back into the analytics layer, creating a self-learning cycle that improves predictions and engagement outcomes.

The future of proactive outreach

The future of outreach is already here. As Robin Gareiss, CEO of Metrigy, has said, “Proactive engagement is becoming the standard - not the exception.”

Nearly nine in 10 organizations are adopting or planning to adopt AI-powered personalization. And the introduction of agentic AI is both accelerating this shift and redefining customer relations, turning engagement from reactive firefighting into proactive relationship-building.

As a result, companies are embracing agentic AI not just for the efficiency it brings, but for its high-value CX outcomes: higher CSAT, stronger loyalty, and measurable revenue growth.

Tomorrow’s winners will be those who:

1. Adopt agentic AI early – embedding adaptive outreach into daily operations.
2. Balance automation with human empathy – using AI for scale and humans for nuance.
3. Build compliance into the core processes – ensuring every interaction builds trust.

The NiCE perspective: Agentic AI works for proactive outreach and better CX

At NiCE, we see agentic AI as the natural evolution of AI-powered proactive outreach. Companies are no longer limited to reaching out only at fixed intervals or in response to predefined triggers; instead, their outreach can be an ongoing dialogue that rapidly adapts as customers’ needs evolve.

Through SmartReach and NiCE Cognigy – bringing together intelligent analytics and self-directed AI agents – organizations can:

• Free employees to focus on complex, empathy-driven conversations
• Consolidate customer insights across every channel
• Dynamically and automatically determine the timing, channel, and delivery of messages
• Ensure compliance and branding across every interaction

The data is clear: proactive outreach delivers results and agentic AI multiplies those results. From boosting CSAT to driving revenue, from ensuring compliance to scaling personalization, the transformation is already underway throughout the customer support market.

As NiCE continues to innovate in this space with SmartReach and NiCE Cognigy, our message is simple: when outreach becomes agentic, engagement is no longer a campaign – it’s a conversation.