When people harness the power of real-time Agentic Automation, productivity soars

October 2025

Julie Cumberland

Every organisation has its quiet frustrations, the slow systems, the duplicate screens, the data that never quite flows the way it should.

One small step for man..... one giant leap for mankind

You don’t need a consultant’s deck to tell you that these small in-efficiencies, multiplied by the thousand little moments of every day, gradually erode performance and patience alike. They steal time, attention, and energy from the people who should be giving it to customers.

Psychologists call it cognitive drag; the mental tax of having to think about the mechanics of a task instead of simply doing it. The more complex the system, the greater the toll. It’s one reason why so many service teams find modernisation exhausting. Every new system promises liberation, yet somehow creates one more password, one more click, one more window to manage.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Real-time agentic automation offers a subtler, more sympathetic form of progress. It doesn’t replace the human at the centre of the process; it clears the obstacles around them. It gives people back their rhythm; that sense of flow which psychologists identify as the point where skill meets focus and time seems to shorten.

Starting Small, Moving Fast

The mistake many organisations make is to view transformation as a single, sweeping act. Big plans look decisive in the boardroom but can feel paralysing on the ground. Teams who are already stretched can’t absorb another programme, another change curve, another promise that life will get harder before it gets better.

Yet meaningful change almost always begins in miniature. One process simplified. One team released from repetition. One clear demonstration that work can be both faster and easier. From that modest success, belief begins to spread and belief, once established, is contagious.

The Human Dividend

When financial services provider NewDay introduced TrustPortal’s real-time agentic automation into its contact centre, the results were striking. A process that had taken agents around ninety seconds to complete was reduced to about four.

But speed alone wasn’t the real story. What mattered was what happened to the people. With the routine steps handled in seconds, advisors found they could stay in conversation; focused, alert, engaged. The call became less about managing systems and more about listening to customers. Productivity rose, but so did satisfaction.

It’s an effect we’ve seen elsewhere too: when the mechanics of work fall away, human confidence returns. The automation becomes invisible; what’s left is the human in their element.

From Proof to Momentum

That is the psychology of progress. Transformation, when done well, doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It begins quietly, in a single workflow that suddenly makes sense, in a team that rediscovers its pace, in a manager who sees results in real time and starts asking “what else can we fix?”

Real-time agentic automation gives organisations a way to harness technology, not surrender to it. It restores agency to the people who do the work, replacing fatigue with focus, delay with delivery. That, in the end, is the essence of modern transformation: not machines taking over, but people finally able to do their best work without the noise.