What Avaya Infinity Became (And Why It Matters Now)

When Avaya launched the Infinity platform in April 2025, the pitch was straightforward: take a fragmented contact center and turn it into something that actually connects. Four pillars, flexible deployment, AI-agnostic architecture. We covered that in our first look at the platform.

But eighteen months later, the story has moved. Avaya Infinity isn't just a unified CX platform anymore. It's becoming an orchestration layer for agentic AI, and the pace of that shift tells you something about where enterprise communications are going.

Here's what changed, what's actually shipping, and what it means for organizations figuring out their next move.

From AI-powered to agentic

In July 2025, Avaya announced that Infinity would support Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that lets AI agents connect to enterprise tools and data sources. By late 2025, Avaya had become the first major enterprise contact center vendor to join the Agentic AI Foundation, the Linux Foundation project that governs MCP's roadmap.

MCP is the protocol that lets AI agents do things, not just talk. Pull billing data during a live call. Check inventory. Route a claim to the right backend system. Without it, AI in the contact center is mostly chatbots reading from scripts. With it, agents can orchestrate real workflows across enterprise systems while the customer is still on the line.

Gartner predicted that agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention by 2029. They also projected that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% the year before. Avaya isn't chasing a trend. They're building infrastructure for a direction the industry is already moving.

Tandem Care: human and AI, not human vs. AI

The most interesting part of Avaya Infinity's 2026 evolution isn't the AI itself. It's how the platform thinks about the relationship between AI and people.

Avaya calls it Tandem Care. The idea: AI handles the background work (gathering information, launching backend processes, coordinating logistics) while human agents focus on what requires empathy and judgment. Both work from the same context, in the same interaction.

In a No Jitter interview, Avaya CTO David Funck walked through an insurance claim scenario. A customer calls about a car accident, and three AI agents work in parallel alongside the human agent. One handles the claims process and sends a tracking link. Another coordinates the tow truck. A third arranges a rental car. The human agent is free to do what AI can't: listen, reassure, and handle the emotional weight of the moment.

"We call that tandem care," Funck said. "We believe that a human and AI together is much, much better than either one of them separately."

Gartner survey data shows that 91% of customer service leaders report executive pressure to implement AI. But industry research shows 88% of contact centers already use some form of AI, while only 25% have fully integrated it into daily operations. The gap between adoption and integration is where most organizations are stuck. Tandem Care is one model for closing it without replacing the people who make customer service work.

The numbers

Avaya shared a case study from a large utility provider that deployed Infinity. The results:

• 75% increase in IVR and self-service completion
• 70% reduction in agent call volume
• 69% reduction in infrastructure and maintenance cost

Those are Avaya's own numbers. But the pattern is recognizable: when self-service actually works, call volume drops, and the infrastructure required to handle it drops with it.

The broader data lines up. Support agents using AI tools handle 35-40% more tickets per shift without an increase in errors. And 75% of CX leaders see AI as a way to amplify human intelligence, not replace it.

Enterprise data, finally connected

Most contact center platforms can tell you that call volume is up. They can't tell you why. A spike in billing calls might be caused by a logistics issue upstream, a shipping delay, or a pricing change that nobody flagged for the contact center.

Avaya's answer is Enterprise Data Activation, built with Databricks. Using Delta Sharing, an open-source protocol for zero-copy data sharing, Infinity pulls real-time data from billing systems, ERP, logistics, and other enterprise sources directly into the contact center context. No ETL pipelines, no data copies sitting in a separate silo.

Funck put it this way in No Jitter: "Most solutions can tell you that the volume is up. But they can't tell you that it's up because there's a flood, or something impacting your shipping and logistics."

This is where Infinity starts to look less like a contact center product and more like an enterprise intelligence layer. The contact center becomes the place where customer data, operational data, and AI converge in real time.

Open architecture as a position

Avaya earned placement in the Omdia Universe 2026 assessment for CX platforms, evaluated on capabilities, market impact, and strategy.

The open architecture position is deliberate. The platform supports MCP so enterprises can plug in AI models from any provider. It integrates with Cognigy, Verint, Google, Twilio Segment, and others through prebuilt connectors. Avaya describes itself as the orchestration layer, not the only layer.

Gartner also warned that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027. Organizations that build their AI strategy on a single vendor's proprietary stack are betting that vendor gets everything right. Open architecture lets you hedge that bet.

What this means for Avaya customers

For organizations on Avaya CC Elite, the path forward doesn't require a rip-and-replace migration. Avaya built Infinity with backward compatibility in mind. Customers can move at their own pace: a number at a time, a workflow queue at a time, an agent population at a time.

The deployment options haven't changed since our original coverage: cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premises. What's new is that each path now includes agentic AI capabilities, the enterprise data activation layer, and Tandem Care workflows. You don't have to choose between modernizing and keeping control.

Where Gage comes in

Gage staff have been deploying Avaya solutions for over two decades. We've watched the platform evolve from Aura to Elite to Infinity, and we've helped organizations navigate each transition without starting over.

The shift to agentic AI is different from a technology upgrade. It changes how organizations think about their contact center: from a cost center that handles calls to an orchestration layer that connects customers, data, and AI in real time. That kind of shift requires strategy, not just implementation.

We help organizations assess readiness for agentic AI in the contact center, design modernization roadmaps that respect existing investments, implement Infinity's capabilities incrementally with governance and guardrails, integrate enterprise data sources so the contact center sees the full picture, and train teams on Tandem Care workflows and human-AI collaboration.

Let's talk

If you're weighing what Avaya Infinity means for your organization, we should talk.

Call (254) 772-3400 or email info@gagetech.com to discuss your organization's readiness.