How Enterprises Can Reimagine Customer Support With AI

Customer support has come a long way from being a transactional function to becoming a strategic pillar of business growth. In 2025, AI continues to be the driving force, enabling organizations to meet rising customer expectations for speed, accessibility, and personalization. AI-powered solutions in the customer support space are not just about meeting immediate needs anymore.

They now drive long-term value by supporting overall brand credibility and trust, enabling employees, service agents, and back-office teams to focus on core functions, unlocking new opportunities through enhanced targeting, more effective campaigns, and more.

Customer-Centricity as a Core Strategy and Tackling Industry Challenges

Prioritizing customer-centricity has always been important, but going forward, it will be the deal breaker – for maintaining a competitive edge. Modern consumers expect seamless, intuitive support across a myriad of touchpoints — through chat, social media, or voice assistance. To meet these expectations and deliver a unified experience, businesses need adaptive, scalable systems that not only provide fast responses but also allow customers to engage on their own terms.

This is where AI-powered solutions can be of immense value, automating basic inquiries and offering scalable self-service options while ensuring consistency and personalized support that helps build lasting customer relationships.

These new-age AI solutions are attempting to enhance self-service capabilities, enabling customers to access information through options like FAQs and interactive tutorials, reducing the number of cases that actually reach support agents. AI also analyzes customer histories and preferences, knitting together data from various touch points to construct a comprehensive picture of each customer's journey - creating an "always-on" support experience that lessens the reliance on human agents.

Strategic Value of Scalability in AI-Powered Customer Support

Massive AI Agent Deployment: Globally, organizations plan to deploy AI-powered virtual agents to meet the growing demand for scalable solutions that can manage large volumes of customer interactions with minimal human intervention. Customer support is set to change phenomenally with AI-driven agents that will reduce operational dependencies on human teams while expanding service reach. 

Addressing Consumer Frustrations: A major driver of this AI adoption is the need to alleviate common customer frustrations. Many consumers face multiple transfers during support interactions, resulting in long wait times and heightened frustration. Studies indicate that a substantial portion of these customers leave with unresolved issues, even during real-time or first-contact interactions. Gen Z customers, in particular, seek smoother, faster AI-assisted interactions over generic chatbot responses, signaling a growing demand for intelligent AI agents capable of handling cases end-to-end efficiently.

Efficiency through Proactive Support: Service representatives spend over a third of their time on non-customer-facing activities, such as data entry and case updates, contributing to operational costs. Shifting these tasks from frontline teams by investing in these tools would yield immediate cost savings without having to increase headcount. Today, many enterprises are looking at embedding AI agents into their services and operations, signaling a shift towards automation.

According to a recent  Gartner study, by 2028, at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI, up from zero percent in 2024. Also, solutions like Data Cloud bring predictive, context-driven support to the forefront that proactively resolves issues, reducing repeated inquiries, minimizing frustration, and driving greater loyalty and retention by leveraging data to transform customer service into a strategic asset.  

Industry-Specific Customization: This latest phase of AI innovation, which combines analytical and decision-making capabilities with an action component, holds transformative potential across industries. These AI agents are designed to offer tailored support for sector-specific workflows, addressing unique challenges and meeting regulatory requirements.

For example, in healthcare, AI agents can assist with patient inquiries and appointment scheduling, alleviating administrative burdens on medical teams while maintaining regulatory compliance. This kind of industry-focused approach enhances service scalability and aligns with sector-specific demands

Building Trust Through the Fusion of AI and Human Insight

The true measure of AI-powered customer support solutions and their impact, especially on its widespread adoption, will depend on how well businesses blend automation with the human touch, and whether they are built around 'bridging the gap between the potential of AI and its practical implementation' or not. The challenge would lie in using them to transform existing operations—redefining customer relationships and creating genuine, empathetic connections that go beyond transactional exchanges.

Security and transparency will be central to this transformation. With growing concerns around data privacy, business leaders will need to prioritize secure systems with integrated security layers to protect sensitive information and foster customer trust.

Moreover, AI should be able to seamlessly escalate complex inquiries to human agents, striking the right balance between automation and empathy, ensuring businesses build deeper trust with their customers by offering better efficiency.  

Looking ahead, the real question is not whether AI will take over customer support but how businesses will integrate AI and human agents into a collaborative partnership, complementing each other's strengths. While the path forward is clear, the challenge for businesses will be in navigating and embracing this evolution effectively.

By Vasudevan Sethuraman, Vice President, Salesforce Practice at Bounteous x Accolite