Five9 Research Finds Shoppers Prefer Human Support
Retail Gazette reported on August 12 that Five9 research found 80% of consumers are willing to use AI-powered customer service, but two-thirds still prefer speaking with a human. The report also said 92% of surveyed businesses have implemented or piloted AI in customer service, while 83% of shoppers said they must repeat themselves at least some of the time after an AI-to-human handoff.
Retail Gazette reported that 80% of consumers are willing to use AI-powered customer service, but two-thirds still prefer speaking with a human. The survey data points to a gap between customer-service automation adoption and consumers' expectations for escalation, transparency, and continuity.
According to Retail Gazette, 92% of surveyed businesses have implemented or piloted AI within customer service. At the same time, 71% of consumers said it was very or extremely important to know when they were interacting with an AI agent.
The AI-to-human handoff was a notable point of friction. Retail Gazette reports that almost all surveyed businesses said they preserve customer context when an interaction is transferred from AI to a human agent, yet 83% of shoppers said they have to repeat themselves at least some of the time.
Five9 CEO Amit Mathradas said successful adoption required companies to make customer experiences "more relevant, more trusted and more human," rather than merely automating interactions at scale, according to Retail Gazette.
AI discovery and service are different problems
The findings arrive as AI tools become a larger source of retail discovery. Retail Gazette cited Adobe Analytics data showing that shoppers referred by AI services generated 41% more revenue per visit than visitors arriving through traditional channels. It also cited a June finding that 41% of U.S. consumers had used generative AI for online shopping.
Forbes, citing research conducted by an e-commerce consultancy with Hanover Research, similarly reported that eight in 10 consumers were willing to use AI-powered customer service while two-thirds preferred human interaction. Five9 stated in that coverage that consumers expect transparency, choice, and smooth transitions when human assistance is needed.
For customer-experience and applied-ML teams, the reported mismatch centers less on whether to expose an AI interface than on whether workflows retain conversational state across routing boundaries. In comparable service deployments, simple, low-risk requests can be suitable for automation, while complex cases create greater pressure on identity resolution, session persistence, agent-assist tooling, and accurate transfer summaries. The survey results make handoff quality a measurable operational concern rather than a purely interface-design issue.
Key Points
- 1Five9's reported survey found AI-service willingness is high, yet two-thirds of consumers still prefer human support for customer interactions.
- 2AI-to-human handoffs remain a material CX gap: 83% of shoppers reported repeating information despite businesses' context-preservation claims.
- 3Comparable AI service deployments make state retention, routing, and agent-assist summaries central technical requirements for complex customer cases.
Scoring Rationale
The survey offers useful evidence for teams deploying AI customer-service and conversational-commerce systems, especially around escalation design and context retention. It is a vendor-linked research finding rather than a new model, platform release, or regulatory development, limiting its broader technical impact.
Sources
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
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