Third-Party AI Beats Brand Chatbots in Customer Service: Gartner

What happened

Consumers are increasingly bypassing company-owned chatbots in favour of third-party generative AI tools — such as ChatGPT — when seeking customer service help, according to new research from Gartner. The findings reveal a striking divergence: whilst consumer use of third-party generative AI for service-related queries has doubled over the past year, adoption of brand-deployed chatbots has shown no statistically significant growth since 2022.

The implication is pointed. Despite considerable investment by retailers and service organisations in proprietary conversational tools, customers are quietly routing around them, turning instead to general-purpose AI assistants they already trust and use in other areas of their lives.

Why it matters

For customer experience leaders, this is a signal that cannot be dismissed as a niche behaviour. When customers choose a third-party tool over a brand's own channel, they are making a judgment — consciously or not — about which experience feels more capable, more honest, or simply less frustrating. From a behavioural economics standpoint, this reflects the principle of least-effort decision-making: people gravitate towards tools that reliably reduce cognitive load, regardless of which company built them. Brand chatbots, often constrained by narrow training data, scripted fallbacks and defensive guardrails, are losing that comparison.

For service designers, the risk runs deeper than deflection rates. When a customer resolves their query through ChatGPT rather than a brand's own interface, the brand loses the interaction data, the relationship moment, and any opportunity to personalise the next touchpoint. The channel designed to strengthen loyalty is being skipped entirely.

By the numbers

• 2× — consumer use of third-party generative AI tools for customer service has doubled in the past year, per Gartner.
• No statistically significant increase in company-provided chatbot usage has been recorded since 2022, according to the same Gartner research.

The Renascence take

Most organisations will read this data as a prompt to upgrade their chatbot's underlying model. That is the wrong lesson. The gap between brand chatbots and third-party AI is not primarily a technology gap — it is a trust and utility design gap, and closing it requires a fundamentally different brief.

Brand chatbots fail not because they run on inferior models, but because they are designed to protect the company rather than genuinely serve the customer — deflecting, restricting and hedging where a good human agent would simply help. The behavioural principle at work is autonomy bias: customers feel more in control when a neutral tool gives them a straight answer than when a branded one steers them toward a preferred outcome. Customer-obsessed operators should audit their chatbot's refusal rate and escalation logic before touching the underlying AI — because no model upgrade will fix a tool that customers have already learned not to trust.