Humans and AI agents, working the same queue.

82% of service professionals agree that customer expectations are higher than they used to be. Customers expect a lot — from 24/7 support to tailored interactions.

And though 81% of service representatives say building relationships with customers is an important part of their job, they spend less than half their time (46%) actually with customers, due in part to administrative tasks and internal responsibilities.

Throw in an expected case volume increase over the next year, and you have a recipe for service rep burnout. Fortunately, service leaders also expect increases in budget to fund operational improvements.

In addition to keeping up with changing customer expectations, service leaders cite difficulty hiring and retaining employees as a top service challenge.

12% of service employees left their company over the past year, and these highly trained individuals are often hard to replace. When hiring, more than a third of service teams struggle to meet demands for better work-life balance and wages, as well as finding talent with the right skills.

To address capacity demands, leaders say the most effective tactics are expanding training and implementing self-service. At companies with AI, leaders cite AI for customer use as their #2 tactic.

As technology becomes increasingly complex, so do cybersecurity threats, with attacks ranging from data poisoning to cloud breaches. IT security leaders acknowledge that AI further complicates the matter — a concern unlikely to fade as the technology becomes more autonomous.

75% of IT security leaders believe AI-driven cyber threats will soon outpace traditional defenses.¹

Indeed, service leaders cite security concerns as their #1 challenge while implementing AI, and over half say it's delayed or limited these initiatives. To combat the issue, 86% say they're willing to pay more for technology that keeps data secure.

1. Salesforce State of IT: Security, 2025.

Companies are investing in all three forms of AI: predictive, generative, and agentic. 69% of service professionals say their organization uses at least one form of AI, with 39% saying they use agentic AI.

Predictive AI forecasts issues, generative AI creates new content like automated responses, and agentic AI takes autonomous actions — completing routine tasks, providing real-time guidance, and collaborating with representatives to resolve intricate issues.

Only 6% of service leaders don't expect to use agentic AI within five years — a finding that tracks, given that 79% say AI agent investment is essential to meet business demands.

AI empowers teams to deliver faster and more accurate interactions — from proactive customer recommendations to real-time insights for leaders. The result: improved decision-making, increased efficiency, and happier customers.

Service ops and leaders who use AI agents expect their service costs and case resolution times to decrease by an average of 20%.

The collaboration between humans and AI yields significant benefits. 83% of service representatives at organizations with AI say they have better career prospects because of it, and 82% say working with AI has helped them develop new skills.

At organizations with AI agents, service representatives take on more complicated cases — more can be accomplished, including meeting customers' needs, both simple and complex.

Multimodal AI is technology that can handle different types of input — voice, text, chat, and visual — all in one system. AI agents are turning these touchpoints into conversations using natural language.

True multimodal interactions preserve history and context across all touchpoints, eliminating the friction customers feel when switching channels. Already, 36% of organizations with both voice and text AI have fully integrated these modes.

Conversational AI works best when it's built on your organization's data — ensuring accurate answers while maintaining brand voice and tone. It also taps customer data to personalize every interaction.

Companies that smoothly hand off conversations from AI agents to human representatives get high marks. These smooth transitions maintain satisfaction while empowering reps to focus on solving the problem, not gathering background details.

Service professionals with conversational AI are impressed with its performance. The technology performed well across the board — 88% of companies say it is good or excellent at keeping their brand voice consistent. Still, there's room for improvement.

One such area is understanding the nuances of dialect and emotion. While 35% say their AI is excellent at understanding emotions, others are less impressed — representing a major frontier for making AI interactions feel truly natural.

Field service professionals face frustrations with inefficiency, and one culprit is administrative tasks. Mobile workers estimate that 18% of their working hours — more than 7 hours per standard working week — are "wasted" on admin duties like filling out forms and hunting for information instead of fixing problems for customers.

37% of technicians say admin tasks keep them from doing their actual jobs.¹

1. Salesforce Snapshot Survey: Field Service, 2025.

Field service leaders aren't just experimenting with AI — they're betting big on its impact. 96% of field service teams plan to use AI for instant access to information through knowledge retrieval, because a technician's time is better spent solving than searching.

Many teams are considering visual diagnoses and repairs guided by augmented reality (AR). 45% currently use AI for AR-guided repairs, and another 43% plan to adopt it.

85% of field service leaders believe their AI investments will increase over the next year.

Technicians say AI could tackle 35% of admin work, freeing up roughly two hours a week. 88% report at least a moderate improvement in technician utilization — and 85% report at least a moderate improvement in dispatcher productivity.