AI in customer service adds jobs more often than it cuts them, survey finds

Remember & Company published its AI Customer Experience Report on 30 October 2026, finding that customer service teams that adopted AI were more likely to reassign or add staff than to cut them. The report is based on a survey of customer service staff and decision-makers at major South Korean companies, conducted through Remember Research, according to venturesquare.net.

Among companies already using AI in customer service, 29% said they had added staff and 18% said they had cut staff. A further 45% said they reassigned existing employees to other tasks instead of reducing headcount.

Expectations differ sharply among companies that have not yet adopted the technology: 36% of them expected their customer service workforce to shrink once they do.

Adopters most often reported customers asking to be connected to a human agent, at 50%, followed by repeat inquiries on the same issue, at 45%. Only 8% had written formal rules dividing AI and human agent roles. Among companies that said AI results exceeded expectations, 78% had criteria separating AI and agent roles, compared with 32% of those whose results fell short.

Adoption remains uneven. While 74% of surveyed companies had introduced or were piloting AI in customer service, only 6% had expanded it company-wide and across all channels. Call summarization and automatic classification was the most cited area for new adoption at 30%, ahead of voice bots at 26% and real-time agent support at 24%.

On spending, 53% of companies planned to increase AI investment in customer service within the next year, while 4% planned to cut it. The survey covered manufacturing and construction, finance, insurance and securities, retail and e-commerce, and IT, telecom and services.