Fifty-Seven Per Cent of Consumers Now Trust a Business Less if It Runs on AI Support

Adoption of AI in customer service keeps climbing. Trust in the businesses doing it keeps falling.

The 2026 AI Customer Service Attitudes Report from AnswerConnect found that 57 per cent of consumers would trust a business less if it predominantly used AI in service interactions, up from 53 per cent the year before.

Natalie Ruiz, the company's chief executive, reads that as a warning about what is being traded away. In the race to automate customer experience, she argues, many companies are eroding the thing that actually drives long-term growth, which is loyalty built on personal connection.

Loyalty is moving the same way

The second number in the report matters more than the first, because it attaches the sentiment to behaviour.

Seventy-three per cent of consumers said they are more loyal to companies that use real people for service interactions, up from 69 per cent last year.

Trust and loyalty are moving in step, and in the same direction. When AI answers, Ruiz says, customers feel handled rather than heard. A customer ready to spend, invest and commit is being processed as a transaction at the exact moment they were prepared to become something more valuable than one.

If you wouldn't want a loved one routed to an AI system during an important moment, why would you want your customers to have that experience

Where the line actually falls

None of this is an argument against automation, and the report is clear that customers draw a distinction businesses often do not.

For routine work, checking an order status or resetting a password, most people want speed and convenience and are perfectly content with an automated system.

The line is judgment. When an interaction requires reassurance, discretion or genuine problem-solving, people still want people.

Ruiz frames it through the moments that matter: buying a house, having a child, choosing a care home for a parent. In each, the difference is made by a person who knows your name, reads the room and makes you feel safe. Her test for any business is blunt. If you would not want someone you love routed to an AI system during a moment like that, it is worth asking why your customers should be.

The disguise is the real offence

The strongest finding concerns not what companies automate but how they present it.

Businesses putting AI in human camouflage, whether that is a voice engineered to sound almost human, a chatbot that types with hesitations, or an agent given a first name, are driving customers away faster than the ones being straightforward.

Eighty-five per cent of respondents said businesses should clearly indicate when a customer is interacting with AI rather than a person.

What customers want, on that evidence, is not simply a human. It is honesty about what they are talking to. Transparency has become a baseline expectation rather than a courtesy, and failing it converts a neutral experience into a deception.

A cost centre on one side, a trust centre on the other

Ruiz is careful not to attribute bad intent, and the business case she is arguing against is genuine. AI reduces overheads, takes no sick days and resolves routine enquiries faster. For a leader under pressure to do more with less, putting it on the front line looks like an obvious win.

Her caution is about what the saving is measured against. Companies treat customer service as a cost centre to be optimised. Customers experience it as a trust centre.

If cost reduction is the main driver of an AI deployment, the eroded trust arrives later and does not appear on the same line of the accounts. Loyalty is not a soft metric, in her framing. It is the revenue line, observed at a delay.

Her practical advice is one sentence: stop trying to make bots feel human, say plainly what they are and exactly how to reach a person. Customers who feel respected are considerably more forgiving than customers who feel deceived.