Reducing Friction and Innovating Services
As AI ingrains itself further into daily life, businesses are looking for ways that the new technology can help them improve services.
Over the last several years, artificial intelligence has exploded in use in all facets of society, particularly in certain fields and business sectors like technology and engineering.
As AI takes more of a place in daily life, businesses of all kinds are looking for ways to incorporate the new and quickly advancing technology into their operations to better serve customers, employees and make services more efficient and accurate.
Several companies throughout South Jersey have taken on the task of creating spaces within their operations to make way for artificial intelligence. We spoke with local businesses to find out how they are best incorporating the technology.
In what ways has your company been incorporating agentic AI into your everyday operations?
“We’re putting AI in place to reduce friction for our members. When our members call our contact center, the front door is a chatbot that we call Gigi. It’s both voice and chat, and it’s basically to help our members if they need to do something that’s simple and straightforward. Whether it’s resetting passwords or checking a balance—those things that don’t really need a person for help—and then that allows our contact center to deliver that concierge support for people helping people. We also use it now for our account opening and loan products.”
-Adrian Rodriguez, senior vice president of data and innovation at American Heritage Credit Union
“At MetaSense, we have transitioned from traditional ‘Linear AI’ to an agentic AI ecosystem. We embed autonomous agents throughout the recruitment lifecycle, specifically within our health care staffing vertical. By utilizing our proprietary iMetaDex™ technology, we deploy agents that do more than just follow instructions—they execute complex goals:
Autonomous sourcing, intelligent skill matching, agentic engagement, predictive workforce orchestration, and compliance and credentialing agents.”
-Dr. Jatin V. Mehta, CEO at MetaSense, Inc.
What have been the benefits and challenges you have seen?
“Implementing an agent-first mindset has fundamentally shifted our operational ROI. By allowing agents to handle the ‘speed and scale,’ our human experts focus on ‘empathy and strategy.’ We have significantly slashed time-to-hire. Agents process data in seconds that would take human teams days, ensuring we win the race for top-tier talent. … We can now manage a 4 times increase in volume without a 4 times increase in overhead, as our agents handle the repetitive documentation and scheduling.
“Even with my background from IIT and Harvard, I recognize that technology is only as good as its implementation. We have navigated several ‘agentic hurdles.’ AI can optimize a process, but it cannot build a relationship. … We must constantly audit our models to ensure they remain fair, unbiased and compliant with the stringent regulations of the health care sector. Moving to agentic AI requires a cultural shift. We invest heavily in training our team to trust and collaborate with their digital counterparts.”
--Dr. Jatin V. Mehta
“I think the keys are all about both the friction and speed in a safe manner. No matter what, when you have a person trying to do all the research necessary, it takes a while. But when the AI can put it all in one spot, even for the things that need that human touch, it allows them to serve the members a lot easier.
“I think the key is using the right flavor of AI for the right purpose. We had some challenges with our early generation of the chatbot because that’s more of a rules-based system, and it depends on the chatbot being able to understand our members and translate it into something that it’s expecting. So that did lead to some friction early on, and we’ve been working on making sure to reduce that friction, identify the best use cases for the AI flavors and making sure that’s what they’re used for.”
- Adrian Rodriguez
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Published (and copyrighted) in South Jersey Biz, Volume 16, Issue 4 (April 2026).
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