Customers Favor General AI Tools Over Brand Chatbots

A Gartner survey reported by Retail Dive found customers were three times more likely to use a third-party generative AI tool than a company chatbot for customer service. The survey covered more than 3,500 business and consumer customers. The report says third-party tool usage doubled over the past year, while brand-chatbot usage showed no statistically significant increase since 2022. These figures are attributed to Gartner and have not been independently reproduced by LDS.

The report also says generative AI is already common across personal and workplace use. It says 58% of customers have used generative AI to complete a task, with task use higher among business customers. Gartner analyst Eric Keller told the publication that familiarity and perceived answer quality help explain why customers begin with general tools they already use.

A general AI assistant offers one familiar interface across many problems. A company chatbot usually appears only after the customer visits a particular site, and prior rule-based experiences may have trained users to expect narrow answers or dead-end redirects. Adding a language model can improve the conversation without fixing that underlying service design.

Brand systems still have a structural advantage: with appropriate authentication and permission, they can inspect an account and complete a transaction. The report argues that many bots fail to use that advantage. They answer a question, then send the customer elsewhere to change an order, update an address, or resolve an account issue.

LDS recommends evaluating service bots by authenticated task completion, correction rates, handoff quality, and customer effort rather than conversation volume alone. A useful roadmap starts with a small set of high-frequency, reversible actions and gives the model controlled tools instead of unrestricted backend access. Each action should have clear confirmation, permission checks, an audit trail, and a reliable human fallback.

LDS recommends measuring successful task completion and customer effort, not chatbot engagement alone. If a brand bot cannot complete the work, it should at least preserve context and make escalation easier. The competitive question is therefore not whether a company has a generative interface. It is whether that interface can resolve a verified customer need more safely and efficiently than the general assistant the customer already trusts.