AI Won't Replace Human Support: Gartner Says Fortune 500 Will Keep Agents Through 2028

AI won't erase human support - and that's a good thing

Ditch the fantasy of a fully agentless contact center. By 2028, Gartner expects zero Fortune 500 companies to eliminate human customer service entirely. AI will reduce ticket volume and headcount, but the human layer stays because it drives trust, revenue, and resilience.

The takeaway for support leaders: stop chasing total automation. Redeploy people where they create growth and loyalty, and let AI handle the routine.

What Gartner predicts

• By 2028, 0% of Fortune 500s will run agentless support.
• By 2027, half of the companies planning major workforce cuts due to AI will reverse course after missing their targets.
• Reason: AI handles clear, repetitive work. It struggles with exceptions, risk, and relationship-building - the work that actually differentiates brands.

Why "agentless" keeps failing

• Edge cases pile up fast; handoffs break if policies and context aren't precise.
• High-risk scenarios (financial, legal, safety) need judgment, accountability, and nuance.
• Trust and lifetime value grow from empathy, context, and continuity, not scripted flows.
• Data gaps and product changes degrade bot accuracy without heavy maintenance.
• One viral failure can erase years of brand equity.

A practical operating model for 2025-2028

• AI-first triage for intent, authentication, and simple resolutions.
• Agent copilots for summaries, suggestions, form-fills, and policy lookup.
• Human ownership of exceptions, VIP accounts, and high-stakes moments.
• Clear escalation rules by risk, value, and emotion - not just queue time.
• A living knowledge base with versioning, approval, and feedback loops.
• QA on both bots and humans; audit prompts, datasets, and deflection decisions.
• Governance: who updates prompts, who approves policies, and how changes ship.

Redeploy humans to growth work

• Onboarding: shorten time-to-first-value with guided setups and proactive outreach.
• Retention: save at-risk accounts with tailored fixes, not generic offers.
• Expansion: identify solved problems that signal readiness for add-ons - with consent-based, customer-first playbooks.
• Insights: turn frontline patterns into roadmap inputs and self-serve improvements.
• Community and advocacy: cultivate power users and capture peer-to-peer deflection.

Metrics that actually steer the system

• Customer outcomes: CSAT, CES, retention, and expansion revenue influenced by support.
• Quality: first contact resolution across channels, not just inside a single queue.
• Risk and trust: complaint rate, regulatory escalations, and public incident count.
• Efficiency: deflection with satisfaction, resolution time, and cost per resolution.

90-day action plan

• Days 0-30: Map top 20 intents, label by risk and value. Stand up AI triage on low-risk, high-volume intents. Define escalation rules and ownership.
• Days 31-60: Roll out agent copilot. Launch a weekly knowledge council to approve and ship changes. Start exception reviews to refine policies and prompts.
• Days 61-90: Redeploy 10-20% of agents to onboarding, retention saves, and insights. Publish a VP-level scorecard blending satisfaction, efficiency, and risk.

Skills to hire and train

• Customer insight and empathy under pressure.
• Product troubleshooting and systems thinking.
• Data literacy: reading dashboards, spotting patterns, writing crisp tickets.
• Prompt writing and bot QA: clear instructions, constraints, and safe fallbacks.
• Compliance and judgment in high-stakes interactions.

If you're upskilling your team on AI-assisted workflows, see role-based programs and certifications here: Courses by job and ChatGPT certification.

Fortune 500 context

The Fortune 500 covers the top US companies by revenue - roughly two-thirds of US GDP. Collectively, they generate about $20 trillion in revenue, $2 trillion in profit, and employ around 30,836,000 people. For scale and stakes, that's the bar AI must clear without breaking trust.

Explore the latest list here: Fortune 500.

Further reading

Gartner's guidance for customer service and support leaders: Gartner Customer Service and Support Insights.