Dive Brief:
- Only one-quarter of AI use cases in customer service produce a return on investment, according to a Gartner analysis of 432 use cases released last month.
- Another one-quarter deliver negative returns, and 42% have unclear ROI in which support leaders say they simply don’t know the value produced. Only 11% of customer support use cases break even.
- Despite such unclear returns, more than three-quarters of leaders are planning to increase investment in AI in 2026.
Dive Insight:
Although executives at major companies from Verizon to Airbnb tout the success of their AI chatbots, cost savings from AI investments in customer service remain elusive for most companies.
Among business functions, customer service leads AI adoption in the enterprise. Gartner found that customer service and support teams are pursuing on average nearly five AI use cases and committing about 13% of their functional budget to AI.
However, customer support leaders are increasingly being graded on something they can’t often prove. More than half of service and support leaders — 56% — expect to have their incentives tied directly to AI outcomes in 2026.
This disconnect is a product of a top-down approach that fails to address customers’ actual needs and simplified assumptions about containment and headcount, experts say.
“What we're seeing with the deployment, the backstory here is like everyone is trying to get AI,” Antoine Nasr, head of AI at Forethought AI Agents by Zendesk, told CX Dive. “This is a top-down initiative: We need AI and customer support and customer experience.”
Too often, when leadership directs customer support to implement AI, it doesn’t begin with a clear customer problem.
“Too many AI rollouts begin with pressure to demonstrate a credible AI strategy to the board, rather than with a clearly defined business problem,” Julie Geller, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told CX Dive via email.
Many businesses expect cost savings via workforce reduction, with AI agents taking over many of the easy-to-answer questions customer service representatives field. But the rate of organizations increasing head count is equivalent to the rate reducing it, with one-quarter reporting workforce growth and about one-quarter reporting reductions, according to Gartner.
As more businesses adopt AI, they also need to hire new specialized roles to manage AI.
The goal of containment is also a misguided approach if it doesn’t help the customer.
“Containment is also too often mistaken for success,” she said. “Delaying contact with a human agent is not the same as resolving the customer’s problem. The real test is much simpler: did the customer get what they needed, with less effort?”
Gartner’s research falls in line with a recent report by Forethought AI Agents by Zendesk. While 70% of organizations have rolled out AI in customer experience, only a small percentage are producing value in the form of improving outcomes and ROI.
