The future of customer service is just around the corner, ushered in by the rapid rise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI).
One new global research report has just released an astounding prediction: 68% of customer service and support will be seamlessly resolved with AI technology by 2028.
This game-changing evolution will revolutionize the ways in which business interact with their customers, greasing the wheels of every customer experience via a flow of personalized, increasingly-efficient, next-gen proactive services.
Agentic AI is more sophisticated and advanced than typical chatbots and canned responses. Cumbersome term aside, these advanced forms of AI can appear intelligent and capable of learning, reasoning, and making decisions on their own, in order to complete tasks with minimal human intervention.
They can comprehend complicated requests, draw information from disparate sources, make independent decisions, and even involve the necessary parties to solve customers’ problems of their own volition.
“I can’t innovate but I can multi-task” This level of autonomy allows for dynamic human-like interactions able to address a much broader spectrum of customer requirements.
The study, which polled thousands of business and technology leaders from around the world, identifies a high degree of confidence in the ability of agentic AI. Virtually all respondents are convinced that it will drive more personalized, proactive and predictive service offerings.
For example, a proactive AI might be able to predict customer’s possible issues from their past interactions in data, providing solution even before the customer has expressed the problem. This could be a move which will lead to increased customer satisfaction and retention.
In addition, the use of agentive AI should lead to large operational gains. By automatically processing routine inquiries, human agents will have more time to concentrate on complex and more critical problems that demand empathetic and nuanced solutions.
This ensures a better response time, better resolution rates, thus a more efficient and cost-effective customer service operation.
But the fast-pace of adopting agentic AI comes with downsides. As a result, businesses need to place a much larger emphasis on ethical use of AI, and how data is handled and stored, to gain and maintain the trust of consumers.
Efficient methodologies, frameworks and governing policies will be necessary to safe and responsibly deploy AI systems, such as autonomous systems – and alleviate risks.
‘Now, rather than replacing human agents, our use of responsive technology will be used to augment them,’ industry pundits say.
The optimal model is a partnership where AI undertakes the mundane tasks and serves as intelligent support, and agents work on more complex issues and building stronger customer relationships.
As we race to 2028, enterprises that apply and deploy responsibly agentic (not to be confused with general AI) AI in their practices will reap a significant competitive advantage, including greater customer stickiness and operational ease.
Customer service revolution brought about by agentic AI is no longer a prediction, and it’s quickly becoming a reality.