By Charles Lee Mathews. As brands race to introduce AI into customer service, many are overlooking a basic question: does it actually make customers’ lives easier?
Niel Mouton, managing director of WPP Enterprise Solutions SA, says the industry has misdiagnosed why customers are leaving brand-owned chatbots for general AI assistants.
He cites a Gartner study from earlier this year. Among the 3,566 customers it surveyed, use of company-owned chatbots has shown no meaningful change since 2022. The use of third-party assistants nearly doubled in a year. “Customers are roughly three times more likely to take a problem to a general assistant than to the brand’s own bot,” Mouton says.
His reading of it matters more than the number. “That isn’t an outright rejection of conversational AI. It’s a rejection of brand-owned bots and the experience and frustrations that customers have come to associate with them,” he says. “People engage with AI when the bot is the fastest, clearest route to an outcome, not because they want more brand conversation in their lives. Brands aren’t wrong about openness to AI. They’re wrong about why people use it.”
Intrusion starts where choice ends
Mouton draws the line at agency rather than volume. “A conversation crosses into intrusion the moment it works against what the user is actually trying to do or demands more attention than the task deserves. So the problem isn’t that the brand is using AI to interact with the customer, but the absence of a clear choice. There’s no easy opt-out and no route to a human,” he says. The test he sets for clients is one question. “Whose job is this interaction doing? If the answer is the brand’s, it’s an interruption wearing conversational clothing,” Mouton counsels.
Charlie Stewart, chief executive of Rogerwilco, blames how cheap deployment has become. “Because it’s now so easy to roll out an AI solution, brands are conflating availability for permission,” he says. “Instead of deploying chatbots that make our lives easier, we get trapped in scripted loops that completely fail to resolve the issue we need help with,” Stewart says. “If the customer hasn’t asked for it, doesn’t need it or can’t easily escape it, then don’t offer it,” he adds.
Rafiq Phillips, chief technology officer at Naritive, measures the cost in the only currency that counts. “In an attention economy where consumer focus is the scarcest and most expensive currency on the table, brands are burning it like it’s an infinite resource,” he says. “If an action that should take a half-second reflex suddenly forces your customer to endure a multi-prompt simulated pleasantry routine, that isn’t digital transformation. It’s attention theft and cognitive drain, gift-wrapped in an LLM prompt,” says Phillips.
Customers, he adds, have learnt to spot the collection exercise. “We can increasingly recognise when a ‘friendly check-in’ is just a clumsy attempt to harvest zero-party preference data under the guise of empathy.”
Only 21% of brands disclose, but 85% of customers demand it
Stewart co-authors the 2026 South African Customer Experience report with Ovatoyou and Julia Ahlfeldt of CX Consulting. Its disclosure finding is the starkest local number in the debate. “While brands are rushing to roll out customer-facing AI, only 21% have implemented a formal disclosure policy. This creates a significant trust gap, especially since 85% of consumers insist on knowing when they are dealing with a machine,” he says. “Customers are clearly open to AI, but they are increasingly wary of being manipulated into ‘faux intimacy’ by bots that are pretending to be humans.”
Phillips is blunter about why the bots exist at all. “Many brands deploy conversational bots not because they believe users crave connection, but as an intentional friction barrier to deflect expensive tier-1 human support tickets,” he says. “They mistake trapped frustration for ‘engaged dwell time’, stripping out real human connection while claiming to build it.”
Fatigue arrives as silence
The clearest signal is the one no dashboard records. “The most telling signal is probably the silence that happens when people bypass the bot entirely in favour of search, reviews and other channels that are giving them better answers,” says Stewart. His report found one in four consumers turns first to online search for help, while only 7% of businesses recognise it. “Bot fatigue rarely arrives as a formal complaint. Instead it shows up as avoidance, which is far harder to see and track, but if customers keep trying to escape your chatbot, it suggests you have a serious design problem.”
Within the chat, Mouton watches for four warning signs: escalation requests within the first two turns, a second contact on another channel within 24 hours, abandonment mid-flow followed by a public complaint, and the language customers use.”‘Is this a bot’, ‘give me a person’, one-word replies,” he says. “These signs appear long before the hard numbers, and they are easier to fix if we treat them as design feedback rather than resistance to technology.” Warmth is not the fix. “People rate helpful bots well and social bots badly. They forgive a blunt bot that works, not a friendly one that wastes their time.”
Phillips flags a signal specific to this market. “In mobile-first, bandwidth-conscious markets, users won’t tolerate waiting for a long-winded LLM to stream two paragraphs of pleasantries over WhatsApp. That is irritating and drains mobile data and battery. The fatigue signal here is an immediate WhatsApp block or muted notification,” he says. He also reports sharp abandonment spikes the moment a bot sends its canned opening message.
He raises a cost nobody else mentions. “Burning megawatts to generate polite corporate small talk is ecologically and architecturally indefensible when lightweight, deterministic automation achieves the same outcome in milliseconds,” says Phillips.
The customer experience lesson is increasingly straightforward: if the interaction does not make the customer’s task faster, clearer or easier, the technology risks becoming another layer of friction.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor toMarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer toMarkLives.com, as well as co-founder ofThe Writers, a writing consultancy.
