# Your customers would rather use ChatGPT than your chatbot, Gartner finds > Source: > Published: 2026-07-08 15:53:15+00:00 Businesses spent big on AI to answer their customers. The customers had other ideas. People are approximately three times more likely to use a third-party GenAI tool, such as ChatGPT, than a company’s own chatbot to sort out a service problem, according to [Gartner, Inc.](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-07-08-gartner-survey-finds-customers-are-three-times-more-likely-to-use-third-party-genai-than-company-provided-chatbots-for-customer-service) The firm, a research and advisory company, surveyed 3,566 customers in February and March. Use of outside GenAI tools during service interactions has nearly doubled in a year. Use of company chatbots has barely moved since 2022. Consumers, meanwhile, have embraced these tools, and [half the US public](https://thenextweb.com/news/pew-research-americans-ai-chatbot-skepticism-regulation-distrust-2026) now uses AI chatbots. ## Money in, little out The spending tells the other half of the story. A separate Gartner survey of 1,303 senior leaders found customer-service teams put a median 12 per cent of their 2025 budget into AI, more than any other business function. Only 24 per cent saw a positive financial return. “The disappointing impact of customer-facing GenAI investments has less to do with technology limitations and more to do with misalignment with customer expectations,” said Eric Keller, a senior director analyst at Gartner. He argued firms should build AI-enabled service journeys across digital and voice, not standalone bots. ## Customers want action, not answers The behaviour has shifted in a second way. People no longer just want an AI to answer a question. They want it to do the task. Among GenAI users, 58 per cent said they had used it to act on their behalf. In business-to-business settings that rose to 74 per cent. Booking an appointment, submitting a document, updating an account: customers expect the bot to finish the job. Most company chatbots still stop at answers. That gap helps explain why people drift to tools that already [act on their behalf](https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-shopping-prime-day-amazon-chatbots). ## Why it matters Customer service has become an early test of whether enterprise AI pays. So far the money flows in faster than the returns, an [adoption-versus-impact gap](https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-adoption-divide-safety-critical-dan-macdonald) seen across industries. Meanwhile the AI labs circle the same work, and rivals keep [buying up support-AI](https://thenextweb.com/news/salesforce-acquires-fin-intercom-3-6-billion). Companies that treat GenAI as a bolt-on chatbot may keep losing their own customers to [someone else’s AI](https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-northslope-acquisition-enterprise-ai-deployment). One more thing: people still want a human on the line when the bot fails. ## Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.