- Gartner Report claims that companies turn or toner their strategies for AI Customer Service
- Almost all businesses will keep human agents in their teams
- Experts require a hybrid approach with AI and people
A growing amount of companies are dropping plans to drastically reduce human customer service roles in the next two years due to technical, operational and cost -related challenges, research has claimed.
A new gardener report found a staggering majority (95%) plan to preserve human agents as a result that recognized AI’s current restrictions on handling complex or nuanced customer interactions.
The report also confirmed that customers prefer human interactions and support, with only 7% trusting AI most for problem solution. Three out of five (62%) also worry that AI will make it harder to reach a human being if they need more detailed support.
Businesses still plan to use human customer service agents
Gartner’s analysts emphasized that AI cannot fully replace people in the field yet, citing poor user experiences and unexpected costs from failed AI implementations.
So far, projects that expect Genai to solve all customer problems have largely come to expectations, and the idea of a full human contact center is neither feasible nor desirable at this time.
“Human touch remains irreplaceable in many interactions, and organizations must balance technology with human empathy and understanding,” explained senior director analyst Kathy Ross.
“A hybrid approach in which AI and human agents work in tandem is the most effective strategy for delivering unique customer experiences.”
However, separate IBM research revealed that British companies are still offering AI -four out of five (83%) Execs expect Agentic AI to improve efficiency, with British companies on average awarding 15% of their IT budgets to AI.
A similar number of Execs (84%) also expect AI to automate repeated tasks at speeds above human speeds by next year.
All of this in mind even admits IBM that there are still some challenges, especially surrounding data quality (49%), trust (46%) and skill deficiency (42%).
IBM Consulting VP for AI Integration Services, Francesco Brenna, explained how AI is not a plug-and-play, solve all the tools to solve all business problems: “This is not about connecting an agent to an existing process and hoping for the best. It means re-architecting how the process is performed, Redesigner User User Experience, Orchestrating Agent Integrates the right data to provide coherence, Hume, and hemne, and Hume, and Hume, and intelligence options all the time.
