The contact center is leaving the building — and Avaya is building the infrastructure to follow it.
Avaya has announced that avatarin, a Tokyo-based robotics and AI startup spun off from Japanese airline holding company ANA Holdings, has selected Avaya Infinity as the platform underpinning its customer experience operations — a deployment that connects AI-powered social robots, phone agents, and chat support into a single, unified intelligence layer.
The partnership is among the more concrete early examples of what the industry is beginning to call physical AI: artificial intelligence that operates not within a screen or speaker, but through robots moving through physical spaces — airline reservation desks, local government service counters, retail floors — engaging customers in person while remaining connected to the same real-time data infrastructure that serves digital channels.
The Problem Being Solved
The central challenge avatarin faced was one of fragmentation. A customer who began an interaction with a phone agent, continued via chat, and then engaged with an on-site robot would, in a conventional system, effectively be starting over at each handoff — their history, context, and unresolved needs lost in the transition between channels.
Avaya Infinity, integrated with Model Context Protocol, addresses this by preserving and passing the full context of each customer interaction across every channel in real time. Whether the next touchpoint is a human agent, a chat interface, or a social robot navigating a physical environment, the conversation history travels with the customer.
“Our objective is to create ‘One Intelligence,’ where AI, robotics, and contact centers function as a single unit,” said Akira Fukubari, chief executive of avatarin. “We place a strong emphasis on AI that enhances human capabilities rather than replacing them. While AI handles scalability and responsiveness, human experts continue to provide the empathy, sophisticated decision-making, and complex problem-solving that customers demand.”
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New Avaya Infinity Capabilities
The avatarin deployment is built on three new capabilities within the Avaya Infinity platform.
The first, Tandem Care, pairs human agents with agentic AI for self-service and automation, using Model Context Protocol to connect to enterprise systems, including billing and customer relationship management platforms for secure, real-time context and task execution. The underlying data intelligence layer is powered by Databricks, providing a central control layer for AI governance and compliance.
The second, Out-of-the-Box Real-Time Insights, combines customer interaction data with enterprise business data from systems such as CRM and ERP to give customer experience managers immediate visibility not just into what happened during an interaction, but why, and what action is recommended in response.
The third, Delta Sharing, uses an open standard for zero-copy data access to feed real-time interaction insights directly from the contact center into the broader enterprise data environment, eliminating the complex extract, transform, and load processes that have historically created operational blind spots for enterprise AI initiatives.
The Physical AI Context
The avatarin partnership arrives amid accelerating physical AI adoption. According to Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report, global adoption of physical AI — robotics and autonomous systems operating in real-world environments — is projected to reach 80 percent by 2028. The Asia-Pacific region is currently leading the adoption, with 71 percent of organizations already implementing these technologies, compared with 56 percent in both the Americas and EMEA.
Seventy-four percent of organizations surveyed by Deloitte expect to deploy agentic AI within the next two years, with AI agents increasingly described as force multipliers that allow human workers to shift into more strategic roles — the precise dynamic that avatarin’s hybrid model is designed to operationalize.
“Avaya Infinity was born in the AI age and is specifically designed to meet the broad and diverse needs of companies like avatarin,” said Marylou Maco, Chief Revenue and Customer Experience Officer at Avaya. “Seeing them bring to life ‘One Intelligence’ is truly a testament to the power of innovation at the speed of AI.”
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Beyond the Contact Center
The broader significance of the Avaya-avatarin partnership lies in what it suggests about the future architecture of customer experience infrastructure. As AI moves from screens into physical spaces, the systems that manage customer context, route interactions, and preserve conversation history must extend beyond the traditional contact center perimeter.
Avaya Infinity’s hybrid cloud design — supporting private, on-premises, and cloud environments without requiring organizations to choose between flexibility and data sovereignty — positions it as infrastructure for exactly that expanded perimeter. The avatarin deployment is an early proof-of-concept. The market it points toward is considerably larger.