49% of brands predict consumers will primarily want to engage via AI agents
While close to half of brands see agentic AI as the future of customer interaction, only 19 per cent of them feel the same way, according to research produced by Adobe.
The provider of customer experience management software and related applications surveyed more than 4,000 consumers across multiple geographies and complemented the results with a study of 3,000 executives to produce its AI and Digital Trends Report.
Adobe’s research revealed additional disconnects between brands and consumers around agentic AI. For example, nearly 30 per cent of brands believe customers would be comfortable with an AI agent handling the research, negotiation and final decision for a complex purchase. Just 16 per cent of consumers agreed.
The majority of brands, meanwhile (78 per cent) said AI will handle the majority of customer support cases within the next 18 months, but 37% of consumers said they would disengage with a brand if they learn they are interacting with AI when expecting a person.
Brands’ enthusiasm for AI doesn’t necessary mean they’ve fully deployed the technology, or are even close. Fewer than a quarter said they’re running limited pilots for agentic AI, for instance, and only 16 per cent have deeply embedded it into their customer support function.
The report suggests there has been more work to prepare policies and processes to support generative AI than agentic AI so far. Sixty-five per cent of brands said they have guidelines for responsible generative AI usage, and 72 per cent said they have the tools they need to connect disparate software systems. For agentic AI, the number was 37 per cent for both areas.
“In a market this fluid, organizations are grappling with questions about where to invest, how quickly to scale, and what now defines a competitive customer experience (CX),” the report’s authors wrote. “Data remains fragmented, alignment between executives and day-to-day practitioners is uneven, and enterprise-wide deployment is still rare.”
360 Magazine Insight
Adobe’s research highlights the fact that many brands are probably looking at AI’s potential benefits in an extremely broad fashion. It’s one thing to hope that generative AI will make employees productive, efficient and more collaborative. Putting that same technology in front of customers is probably still more of a “phase two” until the impact on internal workflows and processes have matured.
This was reflected in the section on measuring impact. For example, 56 per cent of brands said their leadership primarily looks at financial gains from AI. More than half (52 per cent) struggle to show return on investment (ROI) using CX metrics such as CSAT and NPS. This makes sense, given that AI platforms and tools can represent a significant expense (not just in terms of products but the energy and processing cycles they require).
Moving the needle on customer satisfaction, retention and advocacy may also take longer to establish until more brands put generative and agentic AI on the frontlines. This feels like something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but it also shows Adobe and others are trying to take a snapshot of trends that are still more nascent than most vendors care to admit.
The Adobe report is ungated and rendered as a scrollable web page (I actually found myself wishing there was a downloadable PDF!) and could be comforting for CX pros who feel like their organization is falling behind the market. The truth is you probably aren’t.
