B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
$0.25
$0.25 -- cost per call for AI-handled contact centre interactions (2026)
An AI-handled interaction in a contact centre costs between $0.25 and $0.50 according to CloudTalk's 2026 comparison.
- Surface figure; depends on idle time, attrition, escalation, and speech stack costs
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
·
How we verify data →
Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
$0.25
Unit
Currency Usd
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
50
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
CloudTalk
Primary
Tier C
https://www.ondial.ai/blog/ai-voice-agent-vs-human-agent-cost-per-call ↗
Source Article
AI Voice Agents vs Human Agents: Cost Per Call
An analysis from Retell AI found that most operators undercount the true cost of a phone call by roughly half. That single gap is why the AI voice agent vs human agent cost per call debate gets so confused. People compare a vendor's headline per-minute rate against an agent's hourly wage and call it…
Original Research
CloudTalk
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Range $0.25-$0.50; midpoint used. Cited from CloudTalk's 2026 comparison.
Methodology documented
Segmentation
IndustryFinTech
Channelcontent
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI-handled contact centre interactions: $0.25 cost per call. Source: CloudTalk (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-call-cost-2026
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-call-cost-2026" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>$0.25</strong> -- cost per call for AI-handled contact centre interactions<br><small>Source: CloudTalk (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-call-cost-2026" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
Share
Related Statistics
Use this data in your work
Copy the citation, embed the widget, or explore thousands more verified marketing statistics -- all free.