Gartner’s survey of 3,566 B2B and B2C customers, conducted in February and March 2026, found that customers are roughly three times more likely to use third-party GenAI tools than company-provided chatbots to resolve service issues. Third-party GenAI use in service interactions has nearly doubled in the past year, while company chatbot use has stayed flat since 2022. A separate Gartner survey of 1,303 senior leaders found service and support functions invested a median of 12% of their 2025 budget in AI, the highest of any business function, yet only 24% saw positive financial returns.
The reason behind that mismatch matters more than the mismatch itself. Gartner’s own explanation is direct: the disappointing ROI has less to do with AI capability and more to do with what the chatbots were built to do. Among customers who use GenAI, 58% have used it to complete a task on their behalf, not just get an answer, and that number rises to 74% in B2B settings. Most company chatbots are still designed as question-answering tools. Customers are moving toward tools that will actually book the appointment, submit the document, or update the account, and when a company’s own bot cannot do that, the customer simply takes the task elsewhere.
For BFSI and collections operations, that shift carries a different weight than for retail or SaaS. A customer who leaves a banking app to ask a third-party AI assistant about a disputed charge or a payment plan is handing account-specific context to a system with no compliance guardrails, no audit trail, and no connection to the institution’s actual records. The channel-flight problem Gartner is describing is a data governance and regulatory exposure problem the moment it happens inside financial services.
What is easy to miss in the top-line numbers is the third data point: 87% of customers expect the option to reach a human when AI is involved. That figure complicates the instinct to read this report as a mandate for full automation. Customers are not asking for chatbots to disappear or for humans to disappear either. They are asking for AI that can complete the task in front of it while keeping a visible path to a person for anything it cannot resolve. A collections bot that can only answer “what is my current balance” is failing the same test as any other Q&A-only chatbot in this survey, regardless of how conversational it sounds.
This is the design question collections leaders should be asking about their own deployments right now: does the bot resolve the task, or does it just describe the task and hand the customer back to a call queue. Closing that gap means building collections AI around completing specific actions, such as confirming a settlement, scheduling a payment, or updating contact information, with a clear and immediate escalation path to a human agent built into the same conversation rather than bolted on as a fallback. The institutions that get this right will not be the ones that removed people from the process. They will be the ones that used AI to make the parts of the process that do not need a person disappear, so the parts that do get a person’s full attention.