Gartner predicts that roughly 30% of employees laid off across industries because of AI-driven cuts will need to be rehired by 2029, often at a higher cost, and the trend is expected to be most pronounced in customer service. Contact center staff have been “hit first and maybe hardest by the AI hype,” Emily Potosky, senior director analyst at Gartner, told CX Dive. In February 2026, Gartner had already predicted that half of companies that cut customer service headcount because of AI would rehire staff within a year to perform the same functions.
The reversal matters to marketing organizations because customer service is frequently the first AI deployment a company points to when justifying broader automation budgets, including the marketing and CX tooling that shares a vendor and a data layer with the support desk. Gartner’s research found that among AI use cases it evaluated for customer service and support, about a quarter delivered negative returns and another 42% produced unclear value, against a median of almost $6 million in service and support AI spending in 2025. Klarna is the visible example: it began rehiring customer service representatives more than a year after saying its AI chatbot could handle the work of 700 people.
The original insight is what Gartner’s rehiring number implies about tool selection elsewhere in the stack. “To actually maximize ROI from your AI investment, you really need to think about workforce reshaping,” Potosky said, meaning the return depends on redesigning roles around AI, not swapping headcount for a subscription. Vendors selling AI customer service as a cost-reduction tool are marketing against the same cost dynamics Gartner is now flagging as miscalculated, and buyers evaluating AI-driven support deployments should treat a same-year headcount reduction as a warning sign rather than the proof of concept it is often sold as.
Source: CX Dive
