Quant AI's Ava Agent Cuts Customer Support Call Times by 3 Minutes
Quant AI unveiled an AI agent called Ava at the IBM Think Conference on May 6, designed to handle customer service calls and digital chat in insurance contact centres. The agent resolves 84% of calls without human intervention and reduced average call handling time from 11 minutes 30 seconds to 8 minutes 30 seconds in a live deployment.
The system authenticates customers, processes payments, sends forms, and escalates complex issues to live agents while retaining full context. It supports both English and Spanish.
Where Results Come From
Quant is running Ava for Fortitude Re, a reinsurance provider. The results show measurable shifts in how the contact centre operates:
- First call resolution jumped from 71% to 86%
- Average handling time dropped 3 minutes per call
- 84% of calls resolved without escalation
Yogendra Goyal, Global Managing Partner and Head of AI First Business Operations at IBM, said the shift moves beyond incremental improvements. "For 25 years I've been working with insurance carriers to resolve this issue, but it was always about incremental solutions. With Quant, it moves to exponential-resulting in a truly AI-first customer experience."
The Connective Problem
Chetan Dube, CEO of Quant AI, framed the challenge differently during his presentation. Most businesses have fragmented automation tools that don't talk to each other. The missing piece is what he calls the "reasoning layer"-the connective tissue that links systems, people and decisions.
"In three years, every company will be running an agentic enterprise," Dube said. "The challenge is getting from fragmented automation to true end-to-end intelligence."
For customer support teams, this means agents spend less time on routine tasks and more time on issues that require judgment. Ava handles policy questions, claim status checks, and payment processing. Human agents handle exceptions.
What This Means for Your Role
If you work in customer support, AI for Customer Support is moving from pilot projects to production systems. The data from Fortitude Re shows contact centres can reduce call volume per agent while improving first-call resolution.
Understanding how AI Agents & Automation work in your environment-what they handle, how they escalate, what context they retain-is becoming a core skill for support operations.
The IBM Think Conference serves as an annual gathering for enterprise technology announcements. This demonstration signals IBM and Quant AI plan to expand the partnership beyond insurance into other industries.
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