2025 is year that AI takes over all of support and customer success … that isn’t sales.
This is how the 2 related but different categories are segmenting out.
🤷 A lot of support is questions and problems from existing customers.
Almost all of this is going to AI, as much as possible. And this trend is accelerating. Many are already seeing 40% or more of tickets resolved by AI in Intercom, Zendesk, Gorgias, Dialpad, Talkdesk, etc. And some are pushing this much higher.
💰But, where support is really sales, humans will handle it still.
We’re already seeing this bifurcation in e-commerce, because there the “support” chat is often used for sales questions. Which shoes, which size, does this run large, etc. AI for returns, humans to convince you to buy. Etc.
The same is happening, just more slowly across customer success.
Humans are still deployed in customer success for upsell. To get you to buy more stuff. Directly, or in “QBRs” and similar which now have become mainly about upsell.
And the rest is being handed off to AI, support, etc. Or just being eliminated for now, to be replaced by AI soon.
That’s where the world is going post-sales:
🧏🏻♂️ If you’ll buy more, you get a human
🤖 If not, you get an AI. Like it … or not.
Now, of course, this doesn’t have to be you. One of the reasons start-ups have always won is due to truly S-tier support.
Even extreme support, like working directly with the CEOs and founders. I remember back in the day, when Groupon was one of Salesforce’s biggest $10m+ year customers, Salesforce put a big red phone right inside of the salesteam at Groupon HQ. That anyone could pick up for human support 24x7x365. It was a powerful message then.
It still is today.
But for most, these trends are probably irreversible. AI is being tasked to do everything in support, success and post-sales that won’t generate new revenue. While at the same time, we grow our sales teams. It just makes sense.
