According to new research from UJET, 100 percent of customer service agents now interact with AI daily — yet 93 percent say they could still perform their jobs without it.
Seventy-eight percent said their organization’s AI tools are not currently transformative, while 54 percent believe AI is helpful but lacks the context and depth needed for real impact. Not a single respondent considered AI critical to their daily success.
While many brands are attempting to automate customer interactions and reduce headcount by deploying AI, UJET’s findings confirm this approach hinders agent performance and customer experience — creating friction rather than productivity or cost efficiency.
“The rush to adopt AI has caused many brands to overlook their most vital asset: people. AI can empower agents – but instead, fragmented implementations and tools that lack real-time customer context frustrates them while hurting customer experience,” said Vasili Triant, CEO of UJET. “Our research shows AI must shift from automating front-end interactions to eliminating the back-end complexity that truly hinders agent performance and causes poor customer experiences. Only then will brands experience the transformative benefits AI is capable of providing.”
Sixty-five percent of customers expressed frustration about having to repeat information to a self-service AI agent before speaking with a human. Agents are increasingly handling emotionally charged interactions, contributing to increased stress and burnout.
On top of this added workload, 93 percent of agents feel the need to double-check or verify information provided by AI tools before using it with a customer. And 15 percent of agents agreed that real-time AI recommendations are simply unreliable or inaccurate.
Additional findings from the report:
- The depth of AI integration with agents is staggering: 75 percent of agents leverage AI for more than three-quarters of their total customer interactions. Nineteen percent of agents report AI involvement in over 90 percent of their workload. And 16 percent of agents have reached “total integration,” using AI for 100 percent of their customer interactions.
- AI tools are hindered by legacy system complexity: AI inefficiency stems from bloated tech stacks because AI tools cannot operate across siloed enterprise systems and data. Eighty-one percent of agents juggle more than four tools simultaneously, while nearly 20 percent manage seven or more.
- Agents have concerns about their job security in the AI era: 71 percent of customer service agents expect to seek new employment in the next 12 months due to job security concerns around AI.
Despite experiencing limited impact and immediate job concerns, most agents still see a path forward with AI. Fifty-four percent are cautiously optimistic, believing AI could change roles, not replace them.
In fact, 100 percent of agents agree that properly deployed AI saves them time so they can handle more customer requests and interactions (66 percent) and take on higher-value work such as upselling, customer retention, solving complex issues, etc. (20 percent). These time savings are leading to real benefits for agents like earning promotions (78 percent), earning more money (24 percent) and better performance reviews (18 percent).
By offloading mundane, repetitive tasks to automation, agents are also reclaiming the “human” elements of their roles. Without administrative burdens, agents report significant improvements in soft skills like empathy and active listening (25 percent), multitasking and time management (22 percent) and technical troubleshooting (22 percent).
“The future of CX is not a choice between humans or machines. It will be defined by how effectively an organization integrates the two,” Triant added. “Brands must stop minimizing the need for agents in customer service and instead implement AI tools to fuel human connection, trust, loyalty, and build lifetime value – not just focus on deflection and containment. By transforming agents from reactive problem-solvers into proactive brand ambassadors, leaders are turning their customer service agents into their competitive advantage in the age of AI.”
UJET is building solutions to solve the agent experience crisis. For example, the company recently announced Agentic Experience Orchestration (AXO) which introduces a persistent AI layer that obscures system complexity by natively integrating with enterprise-wide data and systems, automating mundane, repeatable conversations with virtual agents and maintaining contextual intelligence throughout the entire customer journey, streamlining the human agent experience while enabling more personal, emotive, and empathetic customer connections.
