A centre of excellence is a small central team that sets standards, builds skills and spreads good practice in one specialist area. For AI agents, it usually owns the method for building, certifying and overseeing agents, the training paths for each role and the lessons from incidents, while business teams run their own agents day to day.
Why set one up?
Because without one, each team reinvents everything. The contact centre writes its own reviewer training, operations writes a different one, and finance writes a third. Each sets its own red lines, its own rota rules and its own idea of what a held action needs. When an auditor asks how the business oversees its agents, there are three answers. A centre of excellence gives one method that every team adapts, rather than many methods that nobody can compare.
It also concentrates scarce expertise. Most businesses have few people who understand agent design, certification and governance in depth. A centre puts them where every team can reach them.
What does a centre of excellence do?
- Sets standards: how agents are scoped, how depth is decided, what reviewers must know.
- Builds training: learning paths for each role, labs, calibration formats.
- Runs shared drills: incident exercises that each team then repeats locally.
- Collects lessons: findings from reviews and incidents across teams.
- Advises new deployments: helping each team plan its first agent.
It should not run the agents. Ownership stays with the business teams, in the first line, or the centre becomes a bottleneck and accountability blurs.
An example
Take a hypothetical insurer with agents in claims, the contact centre and underwriting. Its centre of excellence is four people. They write a single reviewer standard, then help each team adapt it. For the contact centre, they set out who to train first, as in who in a contact centre needs AI agent training first, produce a reviewer onboarding checklist for the contact centre, and run the first quarterly AI agent incident drill for the contact centre. After that, the contact centre's managers run their own drills and calibration, as set out in how to run calibration sessions for contact centre managers. The centre moves on to underwriting.
How is it different from a community of practice?
A centre of excellence is a formal team with a mandate, a budget and standards it can set. A community of practice is an informal network of people who do similar work and learn from each other, usually voluntary and without authority. Both are useful, and they work well together: the centre sets the standard; the community shares how people actually apply it.
A centre is also different from a project team. A project team delivers one deployment and disbands. A centre of excellence lasts, because the standards, training and lessons need a permanent home.
How big should it be?
Small. Two to six people is usually enough for a business with several agent deployments. It needs people who understand agent design and governance, someone with learning design skills, and a link to risk. The guide to training teams for AI agents covers how the centre's training work fits into the wider programme.
Questions people ask
Should the centre of excellence certify people?
It can run internal assessments. External credentials help too, because a certificate checked at source carries more weight with auditors and regulators than an internal sign-off.
Where should it sit in the organisation?
Usually in operations or technology, with a working line to risk. It should not sit in the second line, which needs to stay free to challenge it.