From Vendor Overload to Confident AI Adoption: A Healthcare Contact Center's Journey

In a compelling session at the 2026 ICMI Digital Event, Sarina Swan-Allen and Gina Gibson pulled back the curtain on what AI adoption really looks like when you're running a mission-critical contact center that can't afford to pause operations.

The Challenge: Drowning in Demos

Swan-Allen opened with a reality many contact center leaders will recognize: her inbox had become a "war zone" with 5-10 AI vendors reaching out weekly. After sitting through countless demos that all promised to "revolutionize everything," she faced a critical problem—every vendor presentation started to blur together, and her team was spending hours on evaluations that weren't moving them forward.

"The real cost here was focus," Swan-Allen explained. "Every hour spent on a vendor who wasn't right was an hour not spent on our agents and our donors and our operations."

As Senior Director at Vitalant, one of the largest nonprofit blood collection organizations in the United States, Swan-Allen couldn't simply pause operations to figure out AI. The contact center connects donors to life-saving work every single day, making vendor selection decisions absolutely critical.

The Turning Point: Structure Over Speed

The breakthrough came when Swan-Allen recognized her team needed a fundamentally different approach. Rather than continuing the reactive cycle of random demos, she partnered with Think Forward to create a structured evaluation framework.

Gibson emphasized a key insight: "If you don't know what you're solving for, you'll always be impressed by the wrong things."

Together, they built a comprehensive process that included:

• A structured RFI with use cases specific to Vitalant's needs
• A blind scorecard system to eliminate bias and enable apples-to-apples vendor comparisons
• Internal alignment work across IT, operations, and leadership before vendor selection began
• Clear success metrics with high visibility to stakeholders

The numbers tell the story: the evaluation process took approximately 9 months and involved nearly 40 vendors. Swan-Allen estimated that without Think Forward managing the heavy lifting, it would have consumed at least one full-time senior role for the better part of a year.

The Decision: Enterprise Perspective Over Point Solutions

When it came time to select a vendor, Swan-Allen made a crucial observation: "The core features were actually pretty comparable across the top candidates."

What set the winning vendor (Krista Software) apart wasn't features—it was perspective. While most vendors pitched contact center solutions, Krista approached the conversation with an enterprise-wide lens, considering how the technology could connect and scale across different departments.

"That immediately changed the conversation from what can this do for my contact center to what can this do for my organization," Swan-Allen noted. This enterprise scalability became her non-negotiable criterion from day one.

The Implementation: Crawl, Walk, Run

Rather than trying to "boil the ocean," Swan-Allen's team chose their first use case strategically, looking for something that was:

• Meaningful enough to demonstrate real value
• Scoped tightly enough to learn from
• Equipped with clear success metrics
• Limited in integration complexity for the first iteration
• Highly visible to leadership

The team adopted an iterative approach, building in checkpoints to pause and ask "what are we learning?" rather than plowing forward. Swan-Allen was candid about this phase: "We'll be in our iteration phase for at least another three months before we move into phase two where our true ROI will come through."

The Unexpected Lessons

Swan-Allen shared three critical insights that surprised her:

1. Voice was harder than expected. "Defining the tone, the character, the way we want it to show up to our donors and our agents, and then getting the vendor to truly understand and execute that required more iterations than I expected."

2. It's a strategic challenge, not just a technical one. "I had assumed that the hard part would be understanding the technology, but what I found is that the hard part was getting alignment on what we were trying to accomplish. That's a leadership challenge, not necessarily an IT challenge."

3. The vendor relationship quality mattered immensely. The partnership with Krista Software proved exceptional—they were willing to adjust and come back to the table when something wasn't working, moving beyond a transactional sales relationship.

Five Actionable Takeaways

Gibson and Swan-Allen closed with five concrete steps any contact center leader can implement:

1. Use a structured scorecard for AI vendor evaluation with blind comparisons to reduce emotional decision-making
2. Align IT, operations, and leadership before the vendor process begins, not after
3. Choose your first use case strategically—meaningful but scoped, with clear success metrics
4. Adopt an iterative approach where every sprint is a learning opportunity, not a judgment
5. Don't underestimate the value of external perspective—AI evaluation is a full-time job and should be treated like one

The Bottom Line

Swan-Allen's final message resonated with clarity: "Readiness isn't a destination, it's a decision, and you can make it today."

Her journey demonstrates that confident AI adoption doesn't come from certainty—it comes from preparation. When your foundation is solid, moving forward on incomplete information isn't reckless, it's leadership.

For contact center leaders drowning in vendor demos and pressure to "do something with AI," this session offers a roadmap: structure your evaluation, align your stakeholders, choose strategically, iterate deliberately, and partner wisely. The technology can do remarkable things, but only when implemented with the right framework.

Session Title: From Vendor Overload to Confident AI Adoption A Customer-Led Contact Center Case Study
Speakers: Sarina Swan, Senior Director, Customer Contact Center, Vitalant & Gina Gibson, CEO, Think Forward
Event: ICMI Digital Event 2026

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