newsletter

3 years away: Most customer service to involve agentic AI

Covering a Cisco study, Salesforce acquisition, Meta AI team reshuffling, BJ Wholesale's loyalty approach, and JPMorgan Chase's new bank branch strategy.

Hope Dorman

May 29, 2025

4 min read

AI Headlines

3 years away: Most customer service to involve agentic AI

Cisco’s latest report, The Race to an Agentic Future, reveals agentic AI is set to transform customer service. By 2028, 68% of customer service interactions with technology vendors are predicted to involve agentic AI, offering personalized and predictive services. Despite AI's rise, 89% of customers value a balance between human and AI connection. With 93% expecting agentic AI to drive productivity and savings, ethical deployment and human trust remain critical for vendors to stay competitive.

Salesforce acquisition posed for better AI agent experiences

Salesforce will acquire Informatica for $8B to boost data quality and support smarter AI agent experiences. The move aims to unify backend and customer data, improving ROI on tools like Agentforce.

It’s another example of why a unified tech stack is so important. Want to know how? Get our guide on why you should consolidate your CX tech stack.

Meta reshuffles AI teams

Meta is restructuring its AI teams to boost product development amid fierce competition from OpenAI, Google, and ByteDance. The revamp splits efforts into an AI products team for consumer tools and an AGI Foundations unit for advanced technologies like Llama models. This aims to enhance flexibility, expedite development, and strengthen Meta’s position in the AI race.

CX Quotation of the Week

On turning raw data into insights:

“If you know, for example, that a large volume of tickets are “Where’s my order?” inquiries, that is data. From there, ask: Why does this matter? What can we do about it? If customers who contact support are less likely to make a repeat purchase, that is a business case to improve post-purchase tracking. Better tracking leads to higher retention and fewer tickets—

which also reduces support costs. That is how you build a full story.”

-Taylor Johnson, Director of CX at Nathan James Home

CX Insights

Harvard Business School: AI speeds up service

New research from Harvard Business School of over 250,000 customer service interactions found that an AI chatbot led to improved response times and customer sentiment. Here are some nuggets from the study:

The chatbot led to a 22% drop in response times, even as agent-customer interactions increased (and this was 70% for less experienced agents)
Conversations involving the chatbot had a 0.45 pts increase in customer sentiment on a five-point scale, compared with those without AI
AI improved sentiment when customers asked to cancel their subscriptions

Notably the timeframe for the conversations was December 2020 through November 2021 - and AI-powered customer support technology has come a long way since then. With true AI agents, these numbers will likely improve further.

Thinking long-term about loyalty

BJ's Wholesale Club is enhancing the customer experience with a long-term focus on loyalty and convenience.. By boosting higher-tier memberships and investing in digital innovations like curbside pickup, same-day delivery, and autonomous inventory robots, BJ's is prioritizing member satisfaction. These efforts have increased digitally enabled sales by 35% year over year and driven membership fee income up 8.1%.

CX leaders: it’s an example of how investing in customer engagement can bring long-term growth. These offerings may eat into the margins at the micro level but can boost lifetime customer value and be more profitable in the long run.

Bringing people back to the bank

Everything old is new again: JPMorgan Chase is trying to reinvent wealth management with a subset of brick-and-mortar branches acquired from First Republic. Targeting affluent Americans with at least $750,000 in assets, this service blends personalized concierge-style banking with upscale, hotel-like spaces.

High end brands realize they have to make the investment in personalized, high-touch service environments to earn customer loyalty - especially in competitive industries.