Customer service teams are shifting money from staff and overhead into technology and AI. Gartner surveyed about 200 service and support leaders and released the findings last month. Overall service budgets grew only slightly, while spending on AI rose sharply. Leaders named live chat, phone and generative AI chatbots as their most valuable channels today. Within two years they expect AI chatbots to overtake live chat as the most valuable channel. Actual deployment of AI chat and voice remains low, because the tools are new and need links into several back-end systems. Gartner expects adoption to rise sharply over the next 12 to 18 months. It also warns that AI must work alongside human agents, with a clear route to a person when the bot cannot resolve an issue. Passing call context to agents avoids customers repeating themselves, Gartner says.
What changed
Service budgets previously went mainly to labour and overhead.
- AI spending up 38%
- overall budgets up 2%
- tech spending up 15%
- 13% of budget on AI
Sources