Customer service organizations are shifting money out of labor and overhead and into technology, with AI spending inside service budgets up 38% year over year, according to a Gartner survey of about 200 service and support leaders released last month. Overall service and support budgets grew just 2%, while tech spending within those budgets rose 15%. Organizations now put an average of 13% of their total service and support budgets toward AI initiatives.
Where the money is going
The reallocation is deliberate. Gartner found that service and support leaders named live chat, phone and generative AI chatbots as their three most valuable channels today. Generative AI chatbots and voicebots let organizations scale self-service for inquiries that lend themselves to automation, such as checking an account balance or an order status.
That shift has a second effect: as easy inquiries get automated, human agents handle higher-touch, higher-value interactions. Gartner said the two systems have to work in tandem, not as replacements for each other.
The handoff is the hard part
Gartner's guidance centers on what happens when an AI tool can't finish the job. The system should be built to detect that moment, intake customer information, determine intent and route the customer to the appropriate human agent. That applies whether the AI fails to resolve the inquiry autonomously or the customer simply asks for a person.
AI tools can also pass call context to the human agent taking over, which cuts down on the most common customer complaint in any handoff: repeating yourself. When generative AI and human agents work in concert, Gartner said an organization could see higher first contact resolution rates, which can feed higher CSAT and NPS scores.
Adoption lags the hype
Deployment of generative AI chatbots and AI voice remains low. The tools are relatively new and require integration into multiple back-end systems, which slows rollout. Gartner expects adoption to increase sharply over the next 12 to 18 months because leaders already rate the perceived value highly.
Those same leaders expect the channel mix to keep moving. In two years, survey respondents predicted generative AI chatbots will become the most valuable channel, displacing live chat from the top spot.
Why this matters for customer support teams
Your budget is being redirected whether or not you're on the team building the AI. The 38% jump in AI spending comes out of the same pool that funds headcount and overhead, so support leaders should expect to justify agent capacity in terms of the work AI can't do. The practical test for any chatbot or voicebot rollout is the off-ramp: can the system recognize failure, capture context and hand off cleanly? Teams that get that handoff right protect CSAT while automating the routine tickets. Teams that don't will spend their savings on escalations. Support supervisors who want to get ahead of this can build skills through an AI Learning Path for Call Center Supervisors, which covers AI chatbot management and workforce optimization, or start with broader AI for Customer Support training.
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