<p>Bob just returned from Italy with a story that should make every customer service leader pay attention.</p><p>At train stations in Venice and Florence, there were no employees to help. Just kiosks. If you wanted a ticket, you figured it out yourself. If you had a question, there was nobody to ask. It wasn&#39;t a glimpse of the future. It was the present.</p><p>That experience led us into a bigger discussion about AI, automation, and what customer service becomes when human interaction disappears.</p><p>We unpacked a recent Anthropic report showing that customer service roles have some of the highest exposure to AI-driven task automation. But exposure to tasks is not the same as elimination of jobs.</p><p>The deeper question is this:</p><p><strong>Is customer service simply a collection of transactions, or is it fundamentally about relationships?</strong></p><p>We discussed real-world results from an enterprise deployment of agentic AI where:</p><ul><li>Escalation rates were 4x higher when customers interacted with AI versus humans.</li><li>Customers were significantly more likely to demand supervisors from bots.</li><li>Contact volume increased by 50% in less than six months.</li><li>Companies discovered that delivering bad news remains far more effective when done by a human.</li></ul><p>History suggests that new channels rarely reduce demand. Email didn&#39;t reduce contacts. ATMs didn&#39;t eliminate bank tellers. They changed the nature of the work.</p><p>AI may do the same.</p><p>At the same time, organizations are racing toward automation while learning that token costs, increased interactions, and customer behavior may complicate the promised economics.</p><p>The technology is arriving at bullet-train speed.</p><p>The question is no longer whether AI is coming.</p><p>The question is:</p><p><strong>Who are you in an AI-first world?</strong></p><p>Will your company become a vending machine that happens to sell products?</p><p>Or will you intentionally preserve the human elements that create trust, loyalty, and relationships?</p><p>Because customer relationship management was never supposed to become customer technology management.</p><p>Topics discussed:</p><ul><li>Anthropic&#39;s AI exposure findings</li><li>Why task automation doesn&#39;t automatically eliminate jobs</li><li>The difference between transactional and relational service</li><li>Real-world lessons from agentic AI deployments</li><li>Rising escalation rates with AI interactions</li><li>The hidden cost of token consumption</li><li>Why customers treat bots differently than humans</li><li>The future role of human agents</li><li>How leaders should rethink customer service strategy in an AI-first era</li></ul><p><br></p><p><br></p>