The Fantasy Football Guide to Picking Contact Center AI

The NFL season kicked off this week, which means draft season just wrapped and some of your coworkers took it extremely seriously.

Leagues book the night off, meet in the same basement every August, and carry the trash talk over from last season.

Every one of those rooms has the same four managers in it:

Same board, same league, and all four sets of picks count exactly the same.

If that sounds like your last technology roadmap meeting, congratulations. You already understand fantasy football. So here’s the draft board for your contact center.

Round One Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

With the first overall pick you can have any player in the league, so you take the obvious one.

Round one is the least creative part of the draft, and that’s the point. The best players aren’t a secret, so everybody’s board looks about the same up top. You’re looking for three things:

By that logic, your first overall pick is your knowledge base. Not thrilling. Nobody has ever spilled a drink over documentation.

But it touches every interaction you have, automated or human.

Give your knowledge base bad information and it hands out bad answers with total confidence. It’s the least exciting pick you’ll make, and the one you can’t skip.

The Rest of the Draft Builds Your Team

Round Two: Volume Beats Highlights

Fantasy football is decided by how often a player gets the ball. Someone who gets it twenty times a game is worth more than someone who gets it four, even if those four make the highlight reel.

In your contact center, that’s routing, the rules that decide which conversation reaches which person, and how quickly. It touches everything, gets credit for nothing, and quietly decides whether anybody’s day goes well.

Round Three: Take the Steady One

Some players are just steady. They won’t win you a week on their own, but they’re never the reason you lose.

That’s real-time agent assist, the prompts an agent sees while they’re still on the call: summaries, suggested answers, sentiment. Not highlight material, but it shows up every single time.

Round Four: The Right Player on the Wrong Team

A talented player stuck on a bad team barely scores all season. Move that same player somewhere better and they turn into a star.

Voice automation is that player. Sitting on a current, approved knowledge base, it’s the best pick on your board. Sitting on a stale one, it’s why people hate phone trees.

Same player. Different team.

Three Picks That Wreck Seasons, and Two That Save Them

Every fantasy league has a few of these. So does every contact center roadmap.

Sometimes the Best Pick Is the One Nobody Wants

Did you know that 2025’s highest-scoring kicker, Jason Myers of the Seattle Seahawks, went undrafted in 99% of leagues? At the time of the draft, almost nobody wanted him. But by the end of the season, Myers became one of the most valuable fantasy scorers of the year.

It goes to show that often the most overlooked players can make the most significant impact.

Build your contact center the way you’d build a roster.

Take the obvious pick first. Skip the one that only looks good in a demo. And don’t be surprised when your MVP turns out to be something nobody in the room voted for.

Curious what that first-round pick looks like in practice? LinkLive’s Knowledge Base keeps your AI and your agents working from the same approved answers.