Sam Logan Is Building the Call Center of the Future at Afiniti

What should be a simple call to a phone company or cable provider can turn into a difficult ordeal for any consumer—endless holds, transfers from agent to agent, and bots that can’t seem to hear correctly. By the time the consumer connects with an actual human agent, it’s important that the agent is well-suited to handle the concern. Afiniti uses artificial intelligence to optimize these conversations and improve the way its clients engage their customers.

Sam Logan is Afiniti’s chief legal officer, general counsel, and corporate secretary. He manages the legal, security, and compliance teams charged with managing risk, enabling innovation, and protecting the company’s patents and trade secrets.

While Afiniti leverages the power of predictive AI, Logan is quick to point out that its solutions don’t replace humans—it makes humans more effective. “We are a human-first company because our AI enables humans to interact more positively in a business environment,” he explains.

Since its inception in 2006, Afiniti has demonstrated an ability to make AI work at scale and drive revenue for clients. Leading banks, insurance providers, and telecommunications companies often have tens of thousands of call center agents to handle their enormous call volumes. Each of these calls is an opportunity to impact the customer relationship, either positively or negatively, so companies want to make sure that their customer talks with the best available agent.

Afiniti’s patented solution analyzes data such as customer preferences and agent history before pairing callers and agents to predict how well they are likely to interact. Correct assumptions lead to outcomes like increased renewal rates, fewer cancellations, happier customers, and increased employee satisfaction. Afiniti measures its results against a normalized benchmark, and charges only for the gain delivered.

Logan came to Afiniti in 2018 for the chance to be part of the burgeoning global AI industry. He grew up in the Midwest, but he traveled internationally from a young age as Logan’s parents believed it was important to expose their kids to other cultures. Seeing parts of Africa, Europe, South America, and Asia gave Logan a desire to find a career where he could make a global impact. He studied abroad in England during college, spent a gap year working on international rule of law issues, and then enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center.

When he graduated in 2005, Logan took a job as a corporate associate in the DC office of Latham & Watkins. There, veteran lawyers afforded him the opportunity to gain experience in mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, cross-border transactions, securities, and other matters.

Working alongside talented attorneys who also taught him intangible soft skills prepared Logan to make the leap in-house, which he did by taking a role with education-tech company Blackboard in 2010. This important era helped Logan accomplish two goals. Supporting the company as it expanded into new countries and negotiating complex commercial and corporate agreements—including representing Blackboard in its acquisition of a number of other companies outside the US—bolstered his international business experience while preparing him for a future as a chief legal officer.

Logan leans on his varied experience at Afiniti as he navigates data privacy and security, AI regulation, and the other legal issues facing any major AI-driven technology company. That means working in close partnership with stakeholders across the company, including Afiniti’s chief data officer and information security lead. Together, they seek to ensure all products and services meet six internal “responsible AI” standards, which include accountability, explainability, transparency, fairness, data protection, and compliance. “As artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream, we must continue to demonstrate that we are deploying these tools in a safe and ethical way,” Logan says.

Naturally, innovation is of critical importance at Afiniti, and the company puts a heavy emphasis on research and development. A patent incentive program motivates inventors to submit new ideas, celebrates their achievements, and helps their fellow employees understand the importance of intellectual property.

In that spirit, Afiniti continues to innovate products that complement its flagship AI offering. The company has rolled out a self-service AI product that gives users the ability to add their internal data sources, select the metrics that matter most to them, and visualize AI modeling on a central dashboard. And to underpin the AI offerings, Afiniti has introduced a highly scalable customer engagement platform that can handle any type of interaction, while dramatically reducing the amount of hardware required to operate a call center, which helps clients save money and move toward carbon net-neutrality.

As AI goes mainstream, Logan and his colleagues are thinking about all they can do to help clients build the call center of the future. Although he expects bots or generative AI tools to field basic questions and handle low-value requests like password resets, Logan doesn’t envision companies moving to fully automated call centers anytime soon. “People want to talk to people when they are making big decisions,” he says. “There is a human element to business that no technology can replace.”