Customer service

Airbnb Claims “Best AI Self-Solve in All of Travel” After AI Resolves 40% of Customer Issues

Airbnb’s AI assistant now resolves over 40% of customer issues without a human agent, up from roughly a third in Q4 2025. During the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky described the tool as “by far the best AI...

Ocado’s AI Service Bet Delivers Faster Support With the Human Touch  

For years, customer service leaders have faced a familiar trade-off: improve service quality, or reduce cost. Doing both at once has proved far harder. In a recent webinar, I welcomed Dan Elton, Chief Customer Officer, Ocado and Suveer Kothari, Head of...

Banking on AI: HSBC Weighs 20,000 Job Cuts as It Installs First AI Chief

Three signals in the space of a month tell a consistent story about where HSBC is heading. Last week, Bloomberg reported the bank is weighing cuts of around 20,000 roles, with AI cited as a factor reshaping its workforce needs....

DeepBrain AI Brings Conversational Avatars to Customer Service

Palo Alto-based DeepBrain AI has officially launched its B2B AI Video Agents for real-time, two-way enterprise interactions across customer service and internal operations. According to DeepBrain, the launch “signals a paradigm shift in how businesses communicate, moving beyond static video...

‘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...

Booking.com Parent Company Reveals Real AI Savings in Customer Service

Booking Holdings, the parent company behind Booking.com, Agoda, Priceline, and Kayak, reported a concrete result that most companies are still chasing: its customer service costs fell in absolute terms last year, even as gross bookings grew by roughly 10%. The...

Level AI’s New Platform Challenges the Human vs. AI Debate in Customer Service

Level AI has announced a major expansion of its AI Virtual Agent platform, making the case that businesses have been asking the wrong question. Human agents or AI agents, it should never have been a choice. The company is taking direct...

Tealium and Diabolocom Partner to Provide Context-Aware CCaaS

Customer expectations are rising fast. People want quicker answers, more personalised service and smoother experiences across every channel. In response, technology providers are increasingly joining forces to close gaps in their offerings. The latest example comes from Tealium and Diabolocom,...

Customer Service Leaders Under Pressure to Deploy AI, Gartner Finds

Customer service leaders are facing mounting pressure to accelerate artificial intelligence adoption, as organisations push to modernise operations and improve customer experience. New research by Gartner suggests that AI is no longer viewed as an optional enhancement, but as a strategic...

A Growing Market: Real-Time AI Coaching for Customer Reps

The real-time AI coaching marketplace for customer support agents continues to accelerate, with WINN.AI being one of the latest platforms to secure fresh investment to fuel its expansion. The Tel Aviv-based company has now raised $18 million in Series A funding,...

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Discusses Customer Service Among AI Risks

In his punchy essay “The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI” the CEO of Anthropic AI has a lot to say about the chaotic world of artificial intelligence. From the concentration of wealth and power in...

Gartner Predicts AI Customer Service Costs Will Exceed Those of Offshore Human Agents Soon

The rising cost of AI was a thorny issue across 2025, and one that will likely get worse for the rest of the decade. The cost of back-end AI hardware (silicon, RAM, data centres and energy) is rocketing. So, even...