This month, Capita hosted its inaugural Connect event to showcase the reinvented Capita Experience division. Capita CEO Adolfo Hernandez, Capita Experience CEO Corinne Ripoche, and the management team described the division’s internal transformation and restructuring over the last two years and their strategic vision and tactical steps on the roadmap to delivering CX transformation.

Outside-in restructuring

Capita Experience is the company’s CX managed services unit with ~16k employees in 33 sites in the U.K, Republic of Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, India, Poland, and Bulgaria. It had revenue of £277.4m for H1 2025, forming 24% of Group revenues. It supports brands in telecom and media, utilities, retail and ecommerce, banking, automotive, and the U.K. public sector.

Over two years, Adolfo and Corinne led an internal reorganization, hired multiple new senior management roles, optimized the delivery structure (growing its offshore work from South Africa and nearshore from Bulgaria), increased efficiency (adopting Six Sigma across operations), performed cost optimization, including reducing the cost of acquisition, and changed the operating model to reinvest the savings back into the business. The leadership team also focused on reimagining the internal culture. In Q1 2025, it had ~30k employees contributing to defining new company values.

Capita Experience serves as the test bed for upcoming group-wide changes. As the value chain in CX is deconstructed, this new market creates opportunities for Capita to position itself as a relevant and strategic partner. In parallel, it is surveying clients before and after the internal transformation. It has received positive feedback that Capita is transitioning “from supplier to partner” and is even offering technology solutions at a faster pace than client organizations can absorb.

Shifting the traditional BPO model

Capita is shifting its traditional BPO model from delivering a broad set of services (the company has divested several units in the last few years such as the Capita One software unit and Western Mortgage Services business) to focus on a partner ecosystem, providing only what is necessary and moving away from full platforms toward microservices and orchestrations that deliver targeted business outcomes. This approach gives clients flexibility, solid case management, and more primary solutions when needed. For example, for some clients, Capita provides basic productivity tools integrated with Microsoft Copilot, while for others, it acts as the builder of complex, customized solutions.

In 2024, Capita launched the AI Catalyst Lab, a rapid prototyping team conducting 40–50 simultaneous experiments and has already developed ~50 AI assistants. The Catalyst team is embedded with clients, targeting metrics such as AHT and CLV. With the Catalyst Lab, Capita is proving to clients its ability to implement the latest technology quickly while demonstrating proof of value. For example, the Catalyst Lab team monitors agents on site in Cape Town and then implements AI tools to enhance their performance. The goal is for employees to be well-trained and equipped with tools to remove repetitive work and improve job satisfaction. It partnered with Centrical for AI-driven gamification deployed to ~5k agents. In one implementation, it enhanced productivity by reducing AHT by 10%.

In the bigger picture, Capita views AI deployments not just in terms of cost reduction, but with humans remaining central. The company is leveraging its existing tribal knowledge with longstanding client relationships and the expertise of agents, combined with technology capabilities to deliver solutions that blend operational experience with innovative approaches. For example, working with the consulting firm BCG, it deployed AgentSuite, a GenAI assist tool implemented with ~600 of Capita’s human agents.

Other initiatives include:

• Launching Snowflake POCs with two clients to break down data silos
• Adopting Sanas noise cancellation for ~3.5k Capita employees
• Implementing Symtrain AI training simulations with a telecom client and another brand to improve agent onboarding
• Developing push notifications to customers of a water utility to notify them about disruptions
• Rolling out a customer service virtual agent with a retailer with no human customer care agents initially.

Capita has also trained ~1.6k employees on AI and has started dedicated apprenticeships for AI development via the Capita Academy.

Translating AI capabilities into tangible business outcomes

Capita plans to translate its agentic AI capabilities into proof points and measurable business benefits, targeting first-time outsourcers and helping educate C-level executives on the new performance metrics. The company is committed to outcome-based commercial models that move beyond traditional SLAs, leveraging its experience of transformational deals while adapting the commercial relationships for the current era. As clients seek efficiency and proficiency to free humans’ capacity for value-added customer engagements, they are more willing to invest in case-by-case journey solutions, supported by Capita’s domain and client-specific expertise. Capita’s target clients are those looking to be first movers, particularly in handling complex work rather than routine L1 customer care. By enabling organizations to do more with existing teams, demonstrating tangible business benefits, and co-designing transformations through collaboration, it wants to deliver iterative journeys for each brand. Finally, Capita prepares for change management to play a central role, with operations, technology, and change consultants collaborating to scale solutions.

Demonstrating tangible benefits in a crowded space

Capita envisions becoming the most AI-intensive BPO over the next three to five years, orchestrating human and AI agents, leveraging the best-in-class existing technologies, and applying a deep understanding of client verticals while keeping humans in the loop. For example, as an AWS launch partner for “process to agent” solutions, Capita is introducing new platform components in collaboration with other partners to enrich its value proposition.

The CX services market is undergoing rapid disruption driven by AI and changing customer expectations, creating challenges in adapting quickly, remaining agile, and attracting top talent. The market is fragmented, with technology players, CCaaS providers, managed services vendors, and agentic AI startups competing and collaborating while all claiming to offer “Customer Experience”. Capita Experience looks to position itself as the reference provider, reshaping the company to meet financial market expectations for a trustworthy, growth-oriented, technology-first BPO, which is not a pure-play technology provider. Capita sees its role as an orchestrator and value generator to create new opportunities with hyperscalers and clients. It believes that in this landscape, the new currency is customer experience, and it has a significant opportunity to transform clients’ in-house operations by using technology to replace broken processes rather than merely layering solutions on top of them.