Nearly every organization has put artificial intelligence somewhere in the customer journey, but only 15% combine agentic AI with the cross-departmental orchestration needed to resolve a customer request from start to finish, according to a benchmark report Talkdesk released last week.
Ninety-eight percent of respondents said they use at least one form of AI in customer experience. Generative AI was in use at 74% of organizations and scripted AI at 65%, while 24% reported using agentic AI. Eighty-one percent said they are piloting or have deployed generative or autonomous agentic AI agents, and 19% have scaled them across multiple use cases. Five percent said they can clearly quantify and report AI’s impact on business outcomes.
Data and knowledge infrastructure surfaced as the reported constraint. Ninety-four percent of organizations lack AI-assisted knowledge management. Sixty-four percent run specialized AI agents that hand off tasks between functions, while 35% have AI capable of maintaining customer context and acting across systems. Nearly 80% have deployed 10 or fewer AI automations.
Respondents estimated that roughly one in four customer interactions are affected by incomplete context, repeated explanations, manual escalations and resolution delays. Human agents spend an average of 28% of the workday switching between systems and re-entering data rather than assisting customers, a figure that reaches 35% at the least mature organizations surveyed.
Organizations are also beginning to classify AI differently. Nearly one in five said they now view AI agents more as labor than as technology, and 99% agreed that a hybrid workforce of AI and people is beneficial. Among those that have deployed AI agents, 57% reported that human work has shifted toward higher-complexity tasks. Trust in the quality and accuracy of AI decisions was the most cited concern, named by 52% of organizations.
Compliance was the most cited barrier to automating customer experience processes at 50%, followed by security at 48%, disconnected systems at 45% and legacy infrastructure at 44%. Eighty-three percent of organizations expect autonomous resolution rates to increase within two years.
