Recently I reached out to support at 2 fintechs we used, both at $500m+ ARR, and what did support say?  “We’ll get back to you in a day.”

There’s no excuse for this anymore in the Age of AI.  There was no excuse ever, but pre-AI, keeping up with a high volume of support was always a challenge.  But not today. If your B2B company is still sending customers automated messages that say “Our support team will follow up via email within 1 business day,” you’re already behind.

Way behind.

The Reality Check: A Well Trained AI Today Can Almost Always Do Real-Time Support.  Not All Of It.  But Enough.

Here’s what we know today, right now, going into 2026:

Even a half-decently trained AI agent can answer common customer questions in real time. Not in hours. Not in “1 business day.” In seconds.

And I’m not talking about some futuristic technology that costs $500K to implement. I’m talking about solutions you can deploy this week.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Let’s do the math on what “1 business day” actually costs you:

For a $50/month B2B product:

• Customer submits question at 6 PM on Friday
• Gets auto-response: “We’ll follow up within 1 business day”
• Actually hears back Tuesday morning (because Monday was slammed)
• That’s 3.5 days of frustration
• Churn risk goes up 40%+ when customers are stuck
• If you have 1,000 support tickets/month, even a 2% increase in churn from delayed responses = $12K MRR lost annually

For enterprise deals:

• Prospect asks a technical question during evaluation
• Gets the dreaded auto-response
• Meanwhile, your competitor’s AI agent answered their question in 45 seconds
• Guess who’s moving forward in the buying process?

What “Good Enough” AI Support Actually Looks Like

You don’t need AGI. You don’t need to wait for Claude Opus 5 or GPT-6.

Here’s what you need:

1. Train an AI agent on your top 50-100 support questions

• Most SaaS companies have the same 20-30 questions that represent 70% of volume
• “How do I reset my password?”
• “How does billing work?”
• “Can I integrate with X?”
• “What’s included in each plan?”

2. Give it access to your docs, help center, and knowledge base

• Modern AI agents can pull from multiple sources
• They can even search your Slack history, past tickets, and internal wikis
• One of my portfolio companies hooked up their AI agent to Notion, Intercom, and their public docs in under 4 hours

3. Set clear escalation rules

• AI handles the 70% it knows cold
• Uncertain? Route to human with full context
• Angry customer? Immediate human handoff
• Complex technical issue? Tag the right specialist

4. Monitor and improve weekly

• Look at what got escalated
• Add those answers to the training
• Within 90 days, you’re at 85%+ automated resolution

The Implementation Reality

I’ve watched 20+ companies in my portfolio deploy AI support agents in 2025. Here’s what it actually takes:

Week 1: Audit your support tickets, identify patterns, document top questions Week 2: Choose your platform (there are a dozen good ones now), start training Week 3: Internal testing, refine responses, set up escalation workflows
Week 4: Soft launch to 20% of traffic, monitor like crazy Week 5-8: Iterate, expand coverage, train on edge cases Week 8+: Scale to 100%, redeploy humans to complex issues and proactive outreach

Total cost? Usually $5K-$25K for initial setup, then $500-$2K/month depending on volume.

Compare that to the cost of a support rep ($60K/year + benefits + overhead = $80K+ all-in), and you’re saving money while improving response times from 24 hours to 24 seconds.

But What About the Human Touch?

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: Customers don’t want the “human touch” for password resets and billing questions.

They want speed. They want accuracy. They want to get unblocked and move on with their lives.

The “human touch” matters for:

• Complex troubleshooting that requires judgment
• Emotional situations (customer is frustrated, considering churn)
• Strategic conversations (upsells, expansions, renewals)
• Feature requests and product feedback that requires nuance

For everything else? Customers would rather have an instant, accurate answer from an AI than wait 24 hours for a human to tell them the same thing.

The Competitive Wedge

This isn’t just about cost savings or efficiency.

This is about customer experience becoming a competitive moat.

When your prospect is evaluating you vs. a competitor, and they ask a question at 8 PM on a Sunday:

• You send them an auto-response about “1 business day”
• Your competitor’s AI agent answers in 30 seconds with a helpful, accurate response

Who do you think they’re signing with?

The Bottom Line

If you’re still hiding behind “1 business day” SLAs in 2025, you’re not protecting your support team’s workload.

You’re signaling to customers that you haven’t kept up with the times.

Every SaaS company should have a plan to deploy AI support agents in the next 90 days. Not in 2026. Not “when we have bandwidth.” Now.

Because your competitors already are.

And those “1 business day” auto-responses? They’re the new “We don’t have a mobile app.”

Nobody’s going to say it to your face, but they’re all thinking the same thing:

“Really? In 2026?”

Don’t be that company.