Only 4% of Firms Hit Expected ROI on Customer-Service AI

Only 4% of companies have achieved the ROI they expected from their AI investments in customer service, according to a new survey from Gartner. That figure lands amid a spending surge: AI purchases within customer-service budgets jumped 38%, even as overall service budgets edged up just 2% over the past year.

The gap between expectation and return is the central finding of a report Tomas Gorny, co-founder and CEO of Nextiva, calls a course-correction opportunity for executives. Writing in an expert opinion column, Gorny argues the data shows businesses struggling with the function he calls the most important of all: the customer experience.

The numbers behind the disconnect are stark. The AI market for customer service is expected to reach $14.5 billion this year, according to Persistence Market Research. The same research firm projects it will hit $78.5 billion by 2033 — growth of more than fivefold in under a decade.

Why is the money not paying off?

Gartner analyst Christopher Sladdin points to how companies deploy the technology. "While customer service leaders are eager to accelerate their use of AI, many are failing to unlock its value," Sladdin said in the report. "To create value, customer service leaders need to better understand their customers and their own operations. AI's superpower is that it enables leadership to learn from customer interactions at scale."

The diagnosis matters because the failure rate isn't driven by weak technology. Gorny's reading of the survey is that most businesses use AI simply to handle customer interactions — routing tickets, answering routine queries — without tapping what the tools can actually do. AI can and should be used to design customer experiences that work better than before, not just to automate existing ones.

That distinction separates the 4% from everyone else. The high performers aren't necessarily spending more. They're extracting insight from the data flowing through every customer interaction and feeding it back into how the business operates.

What does it take to join the 4%?

Gorny's framing is blunt: becoming part of that 4% is not all that hard. It just requires a few strategic steps. He doesn't prescribe a long list, but the survey's logic points in one consistent direction — stop hiding data.

When AI is bolted on as a deflection tool, companies never see what the interactions reveal. When leadership uses it to learn at scale, as Sladdin puts it, the same conversations become a map of what customers need and where operations break down. Understanding both, per the Gartner analysis, is the precondition for creating value at all.

The timing gives the finding weight. Companies are committing a growing share of flat budgets to AI — the 38% jump inside a 2% overall increase means something else is being crowded out. With a $78.5 billion market on the horizon by 2033, the vast majority of that spending will flow to firms still inside the 96% getting less than they expected.

Executives reading the survey have a narrow window to fix deployment before the market's growth locks in the current pattern. The ones who treat AI as a learning engine rather than a cheaper answering machine are the ones Gartner's 4% already describes.

By Amara Osei