A Gartner survey has revealed that 77 percent of customer support leaders feel pressure from executives to deploy AI.
The statistic comes from its recent report entitled: "The Most Valuable AI Use Cases for Service and Support".
That study also found that 75 percent of service leaders had received budget hikes to support AI initiatives in comparison to the previous year.
The investment will spur "the typical leader" into adding five new full-time-equivalent (FTE) roles over the next 12 months to help manage these AI projects.
As to what these AI projects may entail, Keith McIntosh, Sr. Principal, Research for Gartner Customer Service and Support, has identified several of the most effective use cases for AI in customer support.
"Service and support leaders are looking to AI for a wide variety of goals – efficiency, better CX, lead generation, and delivering other value back to the business.
The most impactful use cases are four-fold: those that enable assisted agents, empower customers through self-service, automate operational support, and introduce agentic AI across their stack.
Given this, let's take a closer look across these four key arenas, digging into specific use cases across each.
1. Agent Enablement
So far, adoption of contact center AI assistance solutions has lagged expectations, as support leaders prioritize conversational automation.
However, use cases - such as auto-summarization, auto-replies, and desktop automation - are becoming increasingly mature.
Meanwhile, as contact centers invest in self-service, the easy contacts agents use to take a breather are disappearing. Instead, it's tough call after tough call, and - in many cases - reps need more support.
As such, more contact center leaders will put the onus back onto agent enablement, focusing on lowering their cognitive load.
2. Low-Effort Self-Service
Self-service has gained a bad reputation over the years, and while generative AI (GenAI) has enabled superior knowledge retrieval, virtual agents continue to lag their human counterparts.
However, AI agents promise to move the needle, as they collaborate across systems to automate longer-tail resolution flows.
Indeed, Gartner has previously predicted that AI agents will autonomously resolve 80 percent of common customer service issues without human intervention by 2029.
Given this possibility, emphasis will remain on bolstering self-service applications and broader journey orchestration.
