Gartner's February-March 2026 survey of 3,566 customers reveals a fundamental disconnect between where organisations are investing in AI and what customers actually want from it. Customers are three times more likely to use third-party GenAI tools like ChatGPT than company-provided chatbots when handling service issues, with third-party tool usage nearly doubling year-on-year whilst company chatbot adoption has flatlined since 2022. This isn't a technology problem—it's a strategic misalignment. Service leaders deployed a median 12% of their 2025 budgets into AI initiatives, yet only 24% saw positive financial returns. The culprit, according to Gartner's Eric Keller, is that organisations built standalone question-answering chatbots when customers wanted action-oriented experiences. For teams already running Zendesk or Salesforce Agentforce implementations, this raises an uncomfortable question: are you optimising for internal efficiency metrics or for the customer's actual need to resolve issues and move on?
The data exposes two critical capability gaps in current company-provided solutions. First, customers expect GenAI to complete tasks—58% overall, rising to 74% in B2B—not merely retrieve information. Second, customers demand human escalation paths when AI is involved in service delivery. Yet most deployed chatbots remain information-retrieval systems bolted onto existing support infrastructure rather than integrated, conversational workflows that span digital and voice channels. This explains why investment hasn't translated to returns: organisations are measuring chatbot adoption and deflection rates whilst customers are voting with their feet, taking service interactions to third-party tools outside company-owned channels entirely. For support leaders, the implication is stark—the competitive threat isn't from rival vendors' chatbots, but from customers' willingness to bypass your systems altogether. The path forward requires redesigning service journeys around what customers do with GenAI, not what your platform can technically deliver.
Gartner: Customers Prefer Third-party GenAI Over Company Chatbots digit.fyi