Customer Service Increased AI Spending by 38 Percent While Total Budgets Rose by Only Two Percent

Gartner published a survey of 199 customer service and support leaders conducted in April and May 2026. AI spending in their organizations increased by 38 percent even though the total customer-service budget rose by only two percent. The gap shows that most of the investment is not being created by adding new money. Managers are shifting resources away from labor and overhead toward technology. Kim Hedlin of Gartner highlights the main condition: enthusiasm by itself does not make a technology the right solution to a real business problem. An investment must demonstrate that it lowers costs, shortens handling time, increases the rate at which issues are resolved or improves customer satisfaction. Otherwise, the company merely changes the composition of spending rather than the economics of the service. Today, respondents consider live chat and the telephone the most valuable channels. Their view of the next two years is different. Generative chat systems are expected to move into first place, followed by live chat and generative voice assistants. The value of platforms that let companies build autonomous systems without extensive programming, communications platforms and customer identity management is also expected to rise significantly. Gartner is therefore confirming a transition from isolated automations to connected systems of agents. One system may receive a request, another verify the customer, a third retrieve order data, another propose a solution and the last execute the change. Business value increases, but at the same time the simple boundary between a communication channel and an operational system disappears. This has a direct impact on workforce planning. If a 38 percent increase in technology spending is occurring while the overall budget is almost flat, management needs to know precisely which work the technology will actually remove. If an employee still checks every step, manually rewrites the output and deals with the same number of exceptions, the savings will not materialize. The number of automated contacts alone is therefore not a sufficient metric. For management, it is more useful to measure the total cost of a successfully resolved case, the share of repeat contacts, resolution time and customer value after the interaction. An autonomous service that lowers the cost of a call but increases complaints or churn has merely shifted the cost elsewhere. Gartner also points to the governance of agents at scale. Once a system is authorized to work with an account, payment or contract, identity and access management becomes part of the customer experience. The technology budget of customer service will therefore increasingly overlap with security, data and operational architecture. Terms to explain Voice assistant: A system that understands a spoken request and creates or carries out a response by voice. No-code platform: An environment that enables applications or agents to be created mainly from prebuilt components. Customer identity management: Verification of identity and management of customer permissions when accessing digital services.

Customer Service Increased AI Spending by 38 Percent While Total Budgets Rose by Only Two Percent

The full article is available to users registered at Hard Skills