In customer service, third-party gen AI tools are beating brand chatbots

What happened

Consumers are turning to third-party generative AI tools such as ChatGPT for customer service tasks at roughly twice the rate they did a year ago, according to reporting from Marketing Dive and Retail Dive. Over the same period, adoption of brand-owned chatbots has stayed essentially flat since 2022, with no meaningful growth in usage.

The trend suggests a growing share of service interactions are migrating away from the tools brands built and paid for, toward general-purpose AI assistants that customers already trust for other tasks. Shoppers appear to be asking ChatGPT and similar tools to help draft complaints, compare products, interpret return policies or resolve issues that they might once have routed through a company's own chat widget or help centre.

Why it matters

For years, brands have invested heavily in proprietary chatbots as a first line of customer service, assuming customers would default to whatever interface the brand provided. This data suggests that assumption is breaking down: customers are behaving less like captive users of a brand's channel and more like free agents, picking whichever tool feels most competent and least frictional — even if that tool sits entirely outside the brand's control.

From a behavioral-economics lens, this is a trust and effort trade-off. If a third-party AI is perceived as faster, more honest or better at cutting through corporate scripting, customers will route around brand-owned channels regardless of how much was spent building them. For service design teams, it raises a harder question than "how do we improve our chatbot" — it's "do customers still see our channel as the most credible or capable place to get help at all."

By the numbers

• 2x — the increase in consumer use of third-party generative AI tools like ChatGPT for customer service, compared with the prior year.
• Since 2022 — the period over which brand-owned chatbot adoption has shown no meaningful growth.

The Renascence take

Most brands will read this as a prompt to improve their own chatbot's AI. That misses the more uncomfortable signal: customers may not be rejecting brand chatbots because the technology is inferior, but because the incentive structure behind them is visibly self-serving.

Customers have learned that brand-owned bots are built to protect the brand — to deflect refunds, contain complaints, or upsell — while third-party AI tools have no such conflict of interest, or at least appear not to. That perceived neutrality is doing more work than any feature set. The fix isn't a better bot; it's redesigning the incentives customers can sense, so that the brand's own channel is trusted enough to be someone's first choice again, not merely the option they're forced to use before escalating elsewhere.

Operators worried about losing control of the service narrative to unaffiliated AI tools might start by auditing where their own channels have earned a reputation for friction or scripted deflection — because that reputation, more than any interface gap, is likely what is pushing customers toward third-party alternatives.