As with any sweeping technological advancement, companies are re-establishing the number of positions they need, after assessing the impact the tech has on daily work.

The mantra among nearly all companies selling AI for CX is that the rapidly growing technology isn’t replacing people; it’s complementing them.

Technology providers have learned from the voice/data convergence and cloud transformation days that business leaders generally don’t respond favorabily to buying products based on a pitch that results in laying off their colleagues. Even when business leaders don’t care about layoffs, they face the obstacle of adoption. How enthusiastically or successfully will employees adopt technologies that ultimately will replace them?

As a result, we see many vendors adopting slogans like “AI plus human, not AI minus humans” as the cornerstone to vendor sales and marketing strategy. But it’s not entirely accurate, as much as I wish it were.

In reality, AI is replacing employees. It’s also complementing and assisting employees. To ignore the former is simply misleading. In addition, AI may also create new job roles or cause an increase in the number of agents by expanding their capabilities. Any successful technology historically has done the same, whether mobile phones replacing cameras, autos displacing the blacksmith/farrier trade, or the Internet challenging travel agencies.

Real-World Data on Jobs

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What AI agents can do is running up against the limits of what humans are willing to tolerate in customer service.

As companies continue to invest in AI agents for self-service, customers overwhelmingly prefer to speak to a human. CX leaders who ignore this simple fact do so at their own peril.

In Metrigy’s Customer Experience Optimization 2025-26 – Consumer views study, 84.7% of research participants said they would prefer interacting with a human vs. AI agent. Even if they were assured their issue would be resolved, 80.1% would still prefer a human agent, according to the study of 503 consumers.

That’s not to say consumers won’t interact with an AI agent. In fact, 46% say they will use them in select circumstances. The top three purposes they find AI agents are useful: directing them to the right person (50.4%), shipping/order confirmations (49.6%), and scheduling or rescheduling appointments (46.9%).

Customers Aren’t Quick to Accept AI in CX

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Beth Schultz, VP of Research and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, explores how healthcare organizations can use virtual agents to strike a balance between automation and a personal touch.

The healthcare industry has traditionally been characterized by a cautious approach to new technology, largely driven by critical concerns around patient privacy, strict regulatory compliance, and the complexity of integrating new systems. Yet, the industry is simultaneously under immense pressure to deliver patient experiences that are seamless and personalized—on par with the best customer service available anywhere.

For healthcare CX leaders today, the prescription for success centers on artificial intelligence (AI), as revealed in Metrigy’s AI for Business Success: 2025-26 research study. Participating healthcare organizations are moving ahead with AI at a fast clip, ranking among the top five industries using AI extensively across their business. AI, specifically virtual agents, is proving to be a critical enabler, creating harmony between the need for scalable automation and the necessity of human empathy in care.

High adoption and strong performance metrics

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Ensuring autonomous workflows perform with consistent reliability and accuracy is core to customer experience; CX assurance tools can help.

The rapid rise of generative AI and the push toward fully autonomous agents is fundamentally reshaping customer experience (CX). But as it does, it is introducing a new set of complexities that legacy monitoring tools, such as those used for simulating interactions in a traditional, non-digital contact center, simply cannot handle.

This situation leaves organizations planning to use advanced AI agents—generative and agentic—facing a critical question: How do we ensure these agents and autonomous workflows perform with consistent reliability and accuracy over time so that they don’t alienate customers, cause reputational harm, or create other business-impacting problems? The answer lies in CX assurance tools that provide pre-deployment testing rigor and post-deployment performance monitoring and observability.

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Beth Schultz, VP of research and principal analyst at Metrigy, explores how high-impact, low-effort, and perfectly personalized interactions can become the norm with virtual associates on the job.

In the fast-paced world of retail, the customer experience (CX) is everything. Savvy consumers today expect the same personalized experience online as they would receive from a human sales associate in person. This means retailers must deliver hyper-personalized experiences across digital channels, all without overwhelming their human customer service teams.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the perfect fit for retail CX.

The retail industry has aggressively embraced the use of AI for CX. In Metrigy’s AI for Business Success: 2025-26 global research study, 78.6% of participating retailers are already using AI for customer interactions. This isn’t just a handful of pilot programs, either; 51.8% of respondents characterize their use of AI as extensive. AI’s power to deliver the fast, low-effort experience customers demand, driving brand loyalty and a competitive edge, is fueling this adoption.

Virtual AI agents deliver low-effort service

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For years, the contact center industry has been grappling with a fundamental question: Are AI agents better than humans, or do human agents still reign supreme? As Metrigy CEO Robin Gareiss writes in a recent report, our data confirms what many customer experience (CX) professionals already suspect: The answer is, not surprisingly, it depends. The future of service delivery is not a competitive dynamic but a complementary one, based on strategically leveraging the strengths of both AI and human agents.

Metrigy’s global Customer Experience Optimization: 2025-26 study of 656 companies documents this strategic melding, revealing that 85.6% of companies already have humans and AI working together to serve customers. The most effective CX organizations don’t view this as a zero-sum game; they recognize that human agents and AI agents are intrinsically linked, with 40.8% of contact center supervisors viewing their teams this way now, and another 38.7% planning for this future structure.

AI’s primary function today is often enabling human agents to perform better, moving beyond basic functions like transcriptions and summarizations to directly support live interactions. It shines in five critical areas that empower human agents: task automation, information gathering, response suggestions, pre-interaction work, and agent feedback. 

But understanding when AI should take over fully, or when it should merely assist, is the new challenge for CX leadership. This requires constant performance measurement and the use of sophisticated analytics tools. Our findings show humans as best suited for interactions dealing with complex issue resolution, requiring emotional intelligence/empathy, or involving unique customer circumstances. Agents, on the other hand, are best suited for interactions requiring fast data lookups, standardized responses, or simple transactional tasks. 

From our research, we see a clear trajectory for AI’s involvement: It is on swiftly moving upward path. Increased usage is predicated on both greater customer comfort with AI service and continued advancements in natural language processing and context awareness.

For guidance on how to prepare for this future, see the report, AI vs. Human Agents.

Beth Schultz, VP of research and principal analyst at Metrigy, demonstrates how AI in financial services is being leveraged for customer experience and how text and voice agents are delivering transformational value.

Financial services firms face unique challenges when it comes to delivering a consistently exceptional customer experience (CX). Customers today expect prompt, personalized responses to their queries or, increasingly, proactive notifications about account status or other pertinent information, securely delivered. To them, issues such as data silos, system complexity, and regulatory compliance are of little concern.

Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) provides a means of elevating CX to meet customer expectations while at the same time preventing challenges from disrupting service deliverables. Financial services firms aren’t shying away from using it, as Metrigy has found in its AI for Business Success: 2025-26 global research study conducted earlier this year. In fact, the study reveals that the financial services sector leads other industries in adopting AI in general and is demonstrating measurable performance gains.

Not only have most financial services companies studied widely adopted the use of AI for customer and employee interactions, but 80.6% are also applying AI to their customer interaction channels. Only a slight percentage, 5.4%, are holding off on employing AI for customer-facing use cases until 2026 or later.

Customer-facing virtual AI voice and text agents—particularly advanced conversational and generative AI agents—are proving significantly transformative, moving financial services companies beyond simple Q&A functionality.

Sitting between complex legacy systems and the customer, AI agents can enable a thoroughly modern experience without requiring a complete and costly overhaul of contact center infrastructure. Metrigy’s study reveals robust adoption of virtual AI agents among participating financial services companies: 67.7% have already implemented AI text agents, and 59.1% are using AI voice agents, with virtually all of the remainder having both agents on their roadmaps or under evaluation.

Use cases: How AI agents are integrated into core financial processes

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Delivers market insights for nine CX technology areas in 2025

September 5, 2025 – Research and advisory firm Metrigy released its Customer Experience MetriCast 2025 market research study of nine key technology areas driving successful customer interactions.

In the Customer Experience MetriCast 2025 study, Metrigy analyzes buy-side market data provided by 1,397 IT leaders from 11 countries across 34 industries with operational and/or procurement responsibilities. Metrigy looks at technologies in use, providers, spending, ratings of the providers, and relative success using the products. Metrigy also examines the percentage of companies that are changing or planning/evaluating a change in providers, what’s driving them to leave, and which new providers they are considering in the following categories:

Among the study’s findings is that 38% of businesses are now using cloud-delivered contact center service, or CCaaS, in some capacity. “Beyond contact center platform and AI spending, the majority of respondents indicated they were keeping CX spending flat in 2025 with economic uncertainty surrounding tariffs and geopolitical concerns. The growth in CCaaS spending is predominantly from additional seats being added along with increases in staffing,” says Diane Myers, Metrigy senior research director. “Chatbots continue to grow in usage with more voicebots coming online.”

The MetriCast study is part of Metrigy’s MetriCast Service, which also includes market forecast and shares across select customer experience and workplace collaboration technology categories, with quarterly updates; MetriRank vendor ratings across select categories; and the annual MetriStar Awards for vendors earning top customer sentiment ratings and whose customers achieve top business success. For more information, visit www.metrigy.com.

Most do, but not always with the same level of enthusiasm as businesses, according to Metrigy’s research.

“Whom you often long to speak to during a customer service call.” This clue from a recent New York Times mini crossword puzzle gave me nary a pause, thanks to the CX analyst in me. I knew “human” had to be the answer … despite the industry’s best efforts to insert AI agents into customer interactions.

In studying business and consumer perceptions about AI’s use for CX, Metrigy has found several areas in which the two don’t match up. Here’s one example: Most businesses (75.9%) using AI feel their customer service has improved in the last year, according to our global “AI for Business Success 2025-26” study with 1,104 companies. Consumers, however, are divided in their opinions on the quality of their customer service interactions. In an April 2025 study of 503 consumers in North America, only 35.6% reported that customer service had gotten better. The others were fairly evenly split between not seeing any change and seeing a degradation in customer service.

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The next phase of generative AI is agentics, where detailed analytics and AI-powered workflows guide AI agents to take action to solve a problem or address an opportunity. This series covers:

CX Expert Insights Series 2 – Agentics: How and When to Deploy for Maximum Impact

Presented by: Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Elizabeth Tobey, VP of Marketing, NICE
Gavin Frank, VP of Ecosystems, TechSee

Date: June 10, 2025
Time: 12:00 pm ET

View Series