Genesys unveils AI Studio to power safe, scalable virtual agents

Techday NZ

2 days ago

Genesys has launched Genesys Cloud AI Studio, a platform designed to help organisations build, manage, and scale AI-powered customer engagement initiatives with a focus on governance and responsible deployment.
Genesys Cloud AI Studio serves as a central hub for organisations to innovate using no-code tools and built-in compliance measures, introducing agentic AI features intended to improve personalisation and efficiency. Its first released capability, AI Guides, enables teams to design, deploy, and manage autonomous virtual agents across complex customer journeys at scale.
According to Genesys, AI Guides distinguishes itself from existing solutions by supporting virtual agents that can adapt in real-time and manage multi-step interactions, rather than being restricted to pre-programmed flows. Governance and transparency are embedded in the design to address concerns over trust, ethics, and explainability—challenges that have hindered the wider adoption of AI among enterprises.
Hayley Sutherland, Research Manager for Conversational AI at IDC, commented, "Scalable oversight of AI is critically important as we move into agentic decision-making and operation at lightning speed. For enterprises to leverage agentic AI, they must evolve how they approach AI governance and adoption. Genesys is offering organisations a robust entry point for autonomous AI, and the tools to help ensure every AI-powered customer interaction is secure, ethical and aligned to their strategy and values."
Research from the IBM Institute for Business Value indicates that 80% of business leaders see explainability, ethics, bias, or trust as significant challenges to adopting AI, even with conventional deterministic forms such as generative AI. Half of those surveyed admit their organisations do not have the governance structures in place to adequately manage these risks.
No-code tools and governance
AI Guides is designed for businesses looking to scale semi-autonomous customer interactions with minimal technical resources. Unlike most virtual agents that rely on rigid programming and break down under complex scenarios, Genesys claims its new system allows virtual agents to reason, adapt, and make decisions dynamically within guardrails set by the business. This capacity is intended to enable agents to handle more complex, multi-step customer interactions, trigger enterprise-wide workflows, and act in key moments on behalf of brands, while maintaining compliance and oversight.
The features of AI Guides include the ability to build or refine virtual agents using natural language or existing documentation, eliminating the need for coding. Users can design an interaction once and deploy it across different channels, which the company says will promote consistency and reduce duplication of effort. Other capabilities enable seamless integration with front, middle, and back-office systems, automate workflows, and implement testable safety controls to ensure accurate and policy-compliant engagement.
Genesys highlights the model-agnostic architecture of AI Guides, which allows continuous A/B testing and iterative improvements as new language models become available. The Genesys Cloud platform supports integration with proprietary, open-source, and third-party models, including those available via Amazon Bedrock, as well as customer-provided models.
Extending agentic AI
AI Guides is intended to complement existing conversational, generative, and predictive AI functions within Genesys Cloud. Central to the suite is the Genesys Event Data Platform, which transforms raw interaction data into structured insights such as user intent, outcomes, and behaviour to improve customer profiles. Genesys suggests that this enhanced context leads to smarter orchestration and more effective training and operation of AI models.
Further development is planned, with the forthcoming Genesys Cloud Custom Conversation Summaries tool touted to allow organisations to generate interaction summaries tailored to their unique brand voice, compliance needs, and formatting standards.
Olivier Jouve, Chief Product Officer at Genesys, stated, "Many organisations lack the infrastructure and governance framework for the responsible use of agentic AI with their customers today. We're focused on giving every business an accessible and safe path forward. With AI Guides, Genesys is delivering the foundation for agentic orchestration with guardrails and trust embedded so our customers can accelerate innovation and position themselves to drive ROI and differentiation."
Genesys anticipates that AI Studio capabilities, including AI Guides and Custom Conversation Summaries, will be available during the second quarter of its 2026 fiscal year, between 1 May and 31 July 2025.