As many as 85% of customer service leaders plan to explore or pilot customer-facing conversational generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) in 2025, the latest Gartner survey has revealed.
The survey also found that customer service leaders have primary responsibility for identifying new AI opportunities, road-mapping the evolution of AI activities and driving adoption.
With pressure from executive leadership to make Gen AI adoption a success, customer service leaders are committing to improving their technology literacy in 2025. However, many face barriers to adoption such as building and maintaining a reliable knowledge library for conversational AI.
Xabi Zabala, Chief Operations Manager at HBX Group said: “Generative AI is driving a revolution when it comes to customer experience across industries – and the tourism sector is no exception.
“The use of large language models (LLMs) is transforming customer service by enabling virtual assistants to handle complex queries across channels, training team members through voice bots and realistic simulations, accessing and processing documentation and knowledge bases, translating real-time between languages or scaling quality and sentiment analysis efficiently.
“Equally, Gen AI excels in creating personalised content including bespoke itineraries and immersive virtual experiences that inspire travellers before they book. Therefore, an effective use of generative AI can quickly result in improved customer experience, increased sales and higher efficiency.”
She said that as exciting as these opportunities were, AI wasn’t a magic wand and to deliver on its full potential, it must be implemented thoughtfully and safely.
“These risks become especially critical when developing customer-facing conversational AI solutions as opposed to internal-facing process optimisation and automation solutions.
“While Gartner’s latest survey shows that 85% of customer service leaders will explore or pilot customer-facing conversational Gen AI in 2025, customer service leaders must ensure they are optimising the use of the best technology and combining them with human capabilities.
“Generative AI is not to be used as the solution to every problem, and other technologies are often better-suited solutions to ongoing challenges in organisations. When Gen AI is indeed the right solution, the underlying process and data must be fixed or optimised first before applying Gen AI solutions.
“In many cases, Gen AI solutions should be seen as a mechanism to augment and accelerate the capabilities of the human teams, who can, in turn, dedicate increased time to more complex and higher value-add activities for the organisation.”
