Brands have spent years building and tuning their own customer service chatbots. New Gartner research suggests customers have quietly moved on to someone else’s AI instead, and that gap should worry any marketing leader who assumed their owned channels were still the primary point of contact.
Gartner surveyed 3,566 B2B and B2C customers in February and March 2026 and found they are roughly three times more likely to use a third-party generative AI tool, ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot among them, than a company-provided chatbot for customer service. Third-party genAI use for service and support nearly doubled over the past year, while use of company-owned chatbots stayed statistically flat since 2022. A separate Gartner survey of 1,303 senior leaders found service teams put a median 12% of their 2025 budget into AI, the highest of any business function measured, yet only 24% could show a positive financial return.
Eric Keller, senior director analyst in Gartner’s customer service and support practice, put the implication directly: “Rather than investing primarily in standalone chatbots, organisations should focus on AI-enabled service journeys.” Gartner’s guidance also flags that customers increasingly expect to complete actual tasks through genAI, not just get answers, a rate that climbs to 74% in B2B settings, and that they still want a clear path to a human agent once AI is in the loop.
The original insight here is a widening measurement blind spot. If customers are three times more likely to resolve service questions inside a third-party AI tool than inside a channel the brand controls, a growing share of customer interactions are happening somewhere the brand cannot log, personalize or feed back into its own CRM and chat data layer. The budget-to-return gap Gartner found may be partly explained by brands polishing an owned chatbot customers are abandoning, while the AI assistants actually fielding those questions sit entirely outside the brand’s measurement stack.
Source: Gartner
