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The future of customer support lies in the hands of AI. Over the past few years, companies across the world have assessed the feasibility of using AI to interact with their customers – and as of today, their attempts have been quite successful.
Salesforce, the cloud-based sales applications provider, has slashed human escalations in its support infrastructure by a whopping 50%, CEO Marc Benioff revealed on a podcast. He explained that the company plans to realign its workforce, needing fewer support engineers, thanks to a new “robotic support layer” introduced through Agentforce.
“We’re resolving 83% of all of our inquiries robotically. It’s incredible,” he said.
Agentforce is an AI-focused platform that helps businesses create and deploy agents that leverage language models and tools within the Salesforce ecosystem. The company also announced its second iteration, Agentforce 2.0 and has been actively integrating Agentforce internally. At the Agentforce 2.0 launch event, Benioff said, “I’m not just managing human beings, but also managing agents.”
Barely a few months ago, he had said that his vision was to empower one billion agents with Agentforce by 2025. This isn’t Benioff’s prediction; it is the reality that many startups and companies are living in today.
For instance, Klarna, a Swedish payment company, said it eliminated hundreds of human jobs by integrating AI to handle customer queries. It was also reported that Klarna reduced the query resolution time from 11 minutes to 2 minutes. Moreover, the AI integration reduced repeat inquiries by 25%.
“AI can do all of the jobs that we humans do. It’s just a question of how we apply and use it,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna.
In another case, BT Group, the British telecommunications company, said that their virtual assistant ‘Aimee’ handles up to 60,000 customer conversations per week. “Over 30 separate customer experiences have been defined within Aimee so far, with more to follow,” said the company in an announcement.
VCs Bullish on AI Customer Support
Certainly, AI chatbots will sound robotic and won’t have the human touch. Therefore, the onus is on using voice models that are more empathetic in their conversations.
A report from Zendesk suggests that building confidence in AI agents is mostly dependent on how engaging and friendly they are. “More than two-thirds [of 5,000 surveyed] of consumers say they’re more likely to engage with and trust AI agents that exhibit these human-like traits—behaviours that, ultimately, lead to improved CX metrics.”
Salesforce also revealed that a majority of customers do not reuse a company’s chatbots after just one negative experience. “Customers’ expectations continue to increase. They want faster, more personalised service and expect companies to adapt,” it said.
A huge amount of capital is being poured into startups building AI-focused customer support. According to Tracxn, over $6 billion dollars have been invested globally in AI customer service and support platforms over the last four years.
Y Combinator led 31 investment rounds, and Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, a16z and Khosla Ventures led 32 rounds collectively.
Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses, raised a record $175 million in 2024. Founded by OpenAI chairman Brett Taylor, Sierra helps companies build AI “agents” that can automate tasks such as customer service and voice calls.
What Does It Mean for India?
As per a report published in December 2024, India’s call centre, or customer support market, is valued at $33 billion.
“By 2028, more than 50% of customer interactions will likely be handled by AI-enabled systems, helping companies reduce operational costs by over $400 million annually,” read the report.
Tata Consultancy Services’ CEO, K Kirthivasan, believes that AI can push the call centre business to its grave. In an interview earlier this year, he said, “In an ideal phase, there should be minimal incoming call centres. At present, the technology should be able to predict a call and proactively address the customer’s pain point.”
Meanwhile, eighteen Indian startups building AI-related customer service platforms have collectively raised over $600 million in the past four years. Gupshup led the pack and raised over $400 million in the same duration.
Gupshup, a conversational messaging platform founded in 2004, recently partnered with the Ministry of Consumer Affairs to power the AI chatbot ‘Jagriti’ to enhance the complaint-filing process in India.
Moreover, leading e-commerce and payment platforms have also turned to AI customer support. Last month, Meesho, an Indian e-commerce platform, unveiled an AI-powered voice bot.
The company said that the bot handled around 60,000 daily calls and observed a 50% improvement in handling time. It was also able to resolve 95% of the queries.
While Meesho did not report any job cuts, the company did say that the bot freed up time for humans to solve more complex issues.
However, PhonePe, one of India’s leading payment apps, took a rather brutal approach. Over the last five years, the company has cut its customer support team by 60%.
“This efficiency was achieved by increasing automated customer service issue resolutions powered by AI-driven chatbots to over 90%,” read their 2024 annual report.
On the other hand, Ixigo, a travel platform, uses its voice bot, Tara. It handles over 1,000 conversations that sum up to 100 hours daily. The voicebot is also said to resolve 86.95 % of customer complaints without any human intervention.
However, AI in customer support comes with its share of other problems. Earlier this year, an EY report said that “61% [of those surveyed] are more inclined to share personal information with a human rather than through automated processes”.
The report also revealed that 78% of consumers preferred to shop on platforms that provided human customer service support.
“While Indian consumers are putting a lot of faith in artificial intelligence and other technologies, the human touch through authentic, trustworthy connections and engagement is becoming more important than ever before,” said Angshuman Bhattacharya, EY India, national leader – consumer product and retail sector.
So, what’s next for humans? Benioff recently said that Salesforce is adding 2,000 employees to sell the company’s AI-focused products. Perhaps the next big opportunity is to help humans understand why they need AI products.
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