June 17, 2026
79% of Customers Would Ditch a Brand for a Faster Rival
Artificial intelligence has worked its way into nearly every stage of the consumer buying journey, yet the moment that wins or loses a sale still comes down to something simpler: speed. Most brands are too slow when it comes to responding.
Some 79% of consumers will move to a competitor that answers faster, while only a third of brands reply within the hour buyers expect, according to The B2C Buyer Experience Report 2026 from Invoca. The annual study of consumers who made a high-stakes purchase in the past 12 months finds that the sale is often lost before AI ever enters the conversation.
Speed Decides Who Wins
The largest divide in the data is between what consumers expect of a response time and what they actually receive. Invoca reports that half of consumers expect a business to reply within one hour of submitting a form, yet only 36% get a response in that window. When the wait runs long, 27% move to a competitor and few customers abandon the purchase entirely; just 24% wait it out, while about half try to make contact again.
Invoca’s analysis of more than 60 million phone conversations shows why that urgency carries weight. Well over a third of phone leads convert during the call itself, and even more in the strongest-performing industries.
These are buyers ready to commit, not casual browsers. Peter Isaacson, CMO at Invoca, said AI agents have moved from experiment to business requirement, and that brands without fast, capable AI engagement are conceding ready leads to rivals.
Hold Times Trigger Hang-Ups
The report finds that the majority of consumers don’t like to wait and have hung up after being placed on hold for too long. Those who feel ignored will end the call, though, notably, the same edition records a 26-point drop in those who say they would stop doing business after a single bad experience. They will walk away from the call without necessarily walking away from the brand, provided the brand answers next time.
When AI does enter the conversation and falls short, consumers hold the company accountable rather than the technology behind it. Invoca found that 38% blame the brand alone, against 14% who blame the AI vendor, with roughly two-thirds holding the brand at least partly responsible. The vendor takes none of the heat. This accountability question is one the contact centre industry is now confronting directly, as seen in Cisco’s recent move to manage human and AI agents inside a single workforce platform.
The technology has improved enough that consumers increasingly stop noticing it. The study records almost half saying AI made their experience better and only 18% saying it made things worse. Most telling, 63 percent can no longer reliably tell whether they are dealing with AI or a person. That indifference was explored in earlier research showing that half of US travellers no longer care whether AI or a human solves their problem, provided the issue gets resolved.
Humans Still Close the Deal
Consumers accept AI when it works, but they want to be told it is AI and they want a person within reach. The report finds the majority says a brand’s AI should openly identify itself, and would prefer a human representative when both options are equally available. Almost all (96%) said human connection is important during a high-stakes purchase.
Generative AI now sits firmly in the research stage — 58% used a tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to research a purchase, up from 41%.
The brands pulling ahead are not the ones with the most convincing AI, but the ones that answer first. A slow reply loses the lead before any agent, human or automated, gets a word in, while a fast one earns the call — where 37 percent of buyers convert on the spot. The harder discipline is knowing where to stop: using AI to respond in seconds, then handing the decision itself to a person, all while accepting that every AI failure will be charged to the brand’s name, not the vendor’s.
