The AI Service Playbook

The AI Service Playbook is a practical field guide for leaders navigating the real-world adoption of AI in modern customer service operations. Moving beyond hype and experimentation, this book explains how AI-particularly agentic and AI voice agents-can be safely embedded into existing service environments to improve outcomes, control risk, and transform unit economics.

Written for executives, operators, and transformation leaders, the book focuses on how work actually flows through contact centres and service organisations today. It shows how to redesign customer journeys, define clear boundaries between human and AI decision-making, and implement guardrails that satisfy operational, legal, and regulatory scrutiny. Rather than treating AI as a standalone technology project, the authors position it as an infrastructure shift-one that must be governed, measured, and optimised like any other core operational capability.

Through cross-sector patterns, plain-English frameworks, and board-ready business cases, readers learn how to identify high-value use cases, avoid common deployment failures, and scale AI responsibly. The book culminates in a pragmatic 90-day plan that helps organisations move from intent to live results without losing trust or control.

This is not a theoretical AI manifesto. It is a hands-on playbook for leaders who must deliver better service, lower costs, and safer outcomes-at scale.

Keith Hamilton is a UK commercial leader and AI strategist in the contact-centre industry. As Chief Commercial & AI Strategy Officer at Absolute Intelligence UK, he designs and scales blended human-AI operations for regulated and non-regulated sectors, with a focus on measurable outcomes.

Over a three-decade career spanning retail, e-commerce, technology services and healthcare, Keith has led revenue growth, customer operations and digital transformation in roles from supermarket manager to managing director and chief growth officer. His work has ranged from restructuring underperforming store estates to building out e-commerce and marketplace operations, and then into AI-enabled contact centres serving enterprise clients.

Lionel Thain is a British entrepreneur whose career has been shaped by data, consumer insight and the mechanics of scalable customer engagement. He founded Interactive Prospect Targeting PLC and MyOffers, pioneering large-scale consumer databases and running campaigns for global brands. At IPT, he also led a series of UK and international acquisitions that expanded the company's reach and cemented its leadership in performance marketing. IPT won a slew of awards from The Sunday Times (Tech Track 100), IDMF, Fast Growth Business Awards, and others.

In 2018, Lionel shifted his focus to the BPO sector, working closely with a 300-seat South African operation. Over the next five years, he played a strategic role in its transformation into the fastest-growing customer-service centre in the country, ultimately scaling to 4,500 seats in the Utility, Retail, Telco and Leisure sectors.