March 23, 2026
‘Customer Service is the Most Valuable AI Use Case’, Infosys Research Finds
Customer service is generating the most business value from AI in banking, according to new research from Infosys. The sixth edition of its Bank Tech Index, a semi-annual survey of 400 of the world’s largest banks by total assets, places customer service at the top of nine functions ranked by AI business value, with a score of 22 per cent. Sales and marketing and cybersecurity follow at 15 per cent each.
Real Gains at the Contact Centre
The report draws on two bank deployments to illustrate the trend. Citizens Bank introduced an AI-powered virtual assistant, CiZi, capable of handling everyday queries from account balances to credit card fees. According to Infosys, mobile app-driven calls into the contact centre fell by around 44 per cent as a result. Nordic bank Danske Bank deployed an AI assistant to support financial advisors, cutting average call time from six minutes to under a minute while improving accuracy.
Dennis Gada, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Banking and Financial Services at Infosys, describes a sector that has moved past the question of what AI can do: “Our research shows that banks are sharpening their technological choices and becoming more intentional about where and how they deploy AI”. Gada also noted that the primary constraints now lie in change management, workforce adoption, and operating model redesign.
The findings land at a moment when customer service leaders are under growing pressure to deploy AI as customer service is now one of the highest-value areas for AI investment. The Infosys data adds industry-specific weight to that consensus.
Cost Reduction Leads, but Growth Remains a Priority
Across the broader banking picture, cost reduction has re-emerged as the top strategic objective, rising three percentage points from the December 2024 edition. Infosys notes, however, that innovation and growth remain significant drivers, with AI actively fuelling a growth mindset and tokenisation emerging as a new area of interest alongside agentic commerce and payments.
The report also cautions that transforming the business model remains deprioritised. Efficiency gains alone, it argues, do not create new strategic value. That requires changes to revenue models, customer journeys, and decision rights, a challenge that may be especially acute in US consumer banking, where loyalty levels remain low and inertia is high. AI initiatives cancelled before deployment rose 33 per cent year on year, suggest tighter scrutiny of ROI, even as nearly 59 per cent of deployed initiatives are now generating some form of business value.
Measuring AI’s Impact
The Infosys findings appear to contrast part of McKinsey’s State of AI report, published in November last year. The business research institute found that revenue increases from AI are most commonly attributed to marketing and sales, strategy and corporate finance, and product and service development. Customer service does not feature among the leading revenue generators in McKinsey’s cross-sector data.
This difference likely comes down to what each study is actually measuring. McKinsey’s framework is anchored to direct revenue impact, whereas Infosys is capturing perceived business value across a broader set of outcomes. Customer experience improvements are notoriously difficult to convert into a single revenue figure. Reduced call volumes, faster resolution times, and higher satisfaction scores are all meaningful gains, but they tend to sit in operational metrics rather than on an income statement; a challenge that Adoreboard is attempting to solve.
In fact, when the same McKinsey report assessed the benefits of AI based purely on answers from industry professionals, the picture appears to align much more. In this case, nearly half of respondents said that customer satisfaction had seen improvements in their organisations due to AI, just behind employee satisfaction and innovation.
Betting on AI in the Contact Centre
For customer experience leaders, the Infosys data offers reassurance that the investment is producing real results, even where those results are harder to quantify in revenue terms. With hold times being the UK’s most significant CX issue, the competitive pressure to demonstrate strong service performance has not eased. Banks that have treated customer service as a proving ground for AI appear, on this evidence, to have made the right call.
