By 2027, AI alone will no longer be a competitive advantage for customer success and customer service organizations. As brands deploy similar AI capabilities, and customers increasingly interact through personal AI assistants, experiences will become harder to differentiate. This will expose the limits of automation as a CX strategy. Companies are going to have to look for new ways to stand out by (do we dare say?) leaning into more innovative and more economically viable human connection.

2026 planted the seeds of this challenge when customer operations crossed from AI-assisted service to AI-first execution. We saw proof points of AI resolving issues and orchestrating workflows at scale. This drove gains in retention, efficiency, and service delivery. This also forced organizations to rethink their workforces. But we also saw AI successes limited to single-track use cases. These often exposed hidden organizational dysfunction. The lesson we learned is that more automation does not automatically mean better customer experiences.

Three Forrester Predictions For 2027

  • Personal AI assistants will be the main customer service interface for 10% of consumers. In Forrester’s Retail Topic Insights 1 Survey, 2026, 35% of online adults in the US, 41% in the UK, and 49% in Hong Kong reported using AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to research or shop for products in the past year. We expect the gap between using AI assistants for fully autonomous tasks and using them simply to conduct research will still take time to close. Personal assistants will improve in function and trust, and consumers will use them for customer support in 2027. This will cause traffic in customer service channels such as chat and voice to balloon. Leaders, prepare today! Test your customer support channels with personal AI assistants. Make sure they interact with your systems in intended (and aligned) ways.
  • Twenty global B2B companies will create autonomous, cross-system service networks. Recently, an insurance company complained when a back-office dental services organization created a bot that called its contact center to file 30 claims in one session. Similar bot-to-human encounters will push customer service teams to respond with bots of their own to manage bot-initiated requests such as filing claims, managing warranties, scheduling work orders, or creating service tickets. B2B enterprises (more so than B2C) are a fertile ground for bot-to-bot interactions because they run on governed workflows and clear contractual obligations. Leaders, invest in nascent AI-agent interaction protocols to handle bot-initiated and bot-enabled engagement.
  • A dozen brands will shift from pricing by automation to monetizing the human touch. As AI agents handle more success engagement and service inquiries, brands find it increasingly difficult to differentiate CX. In addition, AI costs can skyrocket without disciplined operational and fiscal oversight. In 2027, organizations will start to pivot from productizing automation to commercializing humanly relatable experiences. Customer service organizations will invest in services that feature guaranteed access to human experts delivering conciergelike interactions — or ones augmented by photorealistic avatars. This won’t be easy to do. Leaders, be prepared for end customers to demand measurable outcome metrics, contractual reviews tied to those metrics, and the right to downgrade, cancel, or pay less if the promised experience doesn’t meet stated expectations.

Design For All Your Customers — The AI Ones And The Human Ones

Get ready for a world where AI agents automate customer success and service work and also increasingly act on a customer’s behalf. Your success will depend on more than being internally focused on AI projects. You must make sure that your engagement channels, knowledge, authentication processes, and workflows can seamlessly interact with external AI assistants. Leaders should test customer journeys end to end and be prepared for spikes in engagement volume. Leaders should also start thinking about differentiation beyond automation. Brands that win will be those that combine machine efficiency with memorable human expertise, empathy, and trust.

Forrester clients can read our full Predictions 2027: Customer Success And Customer Service report. There is more detail about each of these predictions, plus two more bonus predictions. Set up a Forrester guidance session to discuss these predictions with me and other key contributors of this report. Use this information to plan out a 2027 customer success and customer service roadmap.

If you aren’t yet a client, download one of our complimentary Predictions guides and access additional resources, including webinars, on the Predictions 2027 hub.

Share