AI agents for customer service and support represent a shift from earlier automation techniques to solutions powered by generative AI (GenAI) that can act with autonomy to fulfill service and support outcomes for customers. As customer service leaders struggle with costofservice, employee turnover, customer experience and operational efficiency challenges, the promise of agentic AI that can manage service processes and take actions with minimal or no human supervision is increasingly attractive. Who are the target users of AI Agents for Customer Service and Support? The primary users of AI agents in customer service and support are organizations with significant customer interaction volumes, such as large enterprises, e-commerce platforms, telecommunications providers, financial institutions, and utilities. Mid-size businesses seeking to scale their support operations efficiently also benefit from these solutions. Key stakeholders include customer service and support teams, contact center managers, digital transformation leaders, and IT departments responsible for customer experience technologies. Additionally, executives looking to improve operational efficiency and reduce service costs are important beneficiaries. What are the core capabilities of AI Agents for Customer Service and Support? - Autonomous Goal Fulfillment: The system must independently pursue customer service outcomes (such as resolving an issue or preventing escalation), not just react to prompts or follow static flows. - Reasoning‑Based Decision‑Making: The system must be able to reason through customer situations and decide what to do next dynamically, without relying solely on predefined rules or scripts. - Ability to Take Actions: The system must be able to execute real service actions within enterprise systems to progress or complete resolution, rather than only suggest actions to humans. What are the benefits of AI Agents for Customer Service and Support? AI agents offer organizations enhanced visibility into customer needs, reduced service costs, and improved operational efficiency. Customer service teams benefit from lower workloads, reduced burnout, and the ability to focus on higher-value interactions. Customers experience faster, more accurate resolutions and a consistently positive service experience. For executives, these solutions drive measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, retention, and overall service performance, positioning the organization for long-term success in a competitive marketplace.
Gartner defines conversational AI platforms (CAIPs) as platforms primarily used for developing applications simulating human conversation across multiple channels and on a mix of modalities such as text, voice and visual content. CAIPs leverage a composition of AI techniques, including classic natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI architectures. To support the building of conversational applications, CAIPs principally provide low-code and no-code coding options. Application areas include AI assistants and conversational AI agents. Conversational AI platforms are designed to address the increasing demand for organizations to efficiently build, deploy and manage AI-driven conversational systems at scale, addressing the requirements of both employee experience and customer experience use cases. While they may offer some predefined AI assistants or AI agents that can be modified, the primary focus of a CAIP is to equip organizations with tools for building customized conversational AI applications. CAIPs typically embed specialized, dedicated and feature-rich tooling for language-specific NLP and multimodal interactions, as well as conversational flow building and analytics. By offering a unified environment that supports low-code and no-code development — and, in some cases, extends to pro-code and GenAI-assisted options — CAIPs empower technically savvy business users, including citizen developers, to create and orchestrate both customer-facing and internal AI assistants and conversational agents. Unlike AI engineering environments, which primarily serve AI engineers, software developers and data scientists, CAIPs are purpose-built for broad enterprise adoption, enabling strategic, scalable and organizationwide conversational AI initiatives.
Generative AI (GenAI) engineering refers to the field of engineering that focuses on the development, implementation and optimization of generative AI models. Generative AI refers to technologies that can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. By developing GenAI models, engineers can create new and innovative ways to generate content. The vendors in this segment are made up by incumbent and startup vendors covering full-model life cycle management, specifically adjusted to and catering to development, refinement and deployment of generative models (e.g., LLMs) and other GenAI artifacts in production applications. Please note that this market is based on Beta research and is continuously evolving. We will be making changes as and when there are new updates.