Gartner: Customers Are Three Times More Likely to Turn to ChatGPT Than to a Company's Own Chatbot

Companies have spent years pouring money into their own AI chatbots for customer support, but customers are steering clear of them: people are almost three times as likely to resolve a service problem through a third-party GenAI tool such as ChatGPT as through the company's branded bot. That is the conclusion of research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc., based on a customer survey.

What the Gartner survey showed

Gartner asked 3566 customers which tool they use when they need to fix a service problem or get help from a company. The result is awkward for business: instead of the chatbot built into a company's website or app, people more often open the familiar ChatGPT or another general-purpose AI service and sort out the issue there.

• The survey was conducted by research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc.
• The sample comprised 3566 customers
• People are roughly 3 times more likely to choose a third-party GenAI app than a company's branded chatbot
• The findings concern resolving service issues and support requests specifically

Why customers choose someone else's AI

Businesses have invested for years in their own AI-based support systems, from simple FAQ bots to full-fledged agents built into the customer account area. The logic was straightforward: keep the customer inside the company's ecosystem and reduce the load on human agents. But Gartner's data shows this calculation is not working the way businesses expected: customers prefer a tool they already know and that works for everything, rather than learning to use yet another branded bot on every individual site.

From the user's side, the logic is also clear: ChatGPT is already installed on their phone or open in a browser tab, answers quickly, and often phrases its answer more clearly than a narrowly specialized corporate bot trained only on one company's policies.

What businesses are losing

If a customer resolves an issue through a third-party app, the company loses control of the conversation: it cannot see what exactly ChatGPT told its customer, cannot steer the exchange toward the right scenario, and does not collect data on the request itself. Meanwhile, the budget for developing and maintaining its own bot has already been spent, and users still choose not to use it. That leaves businesses with a question: either radically improve the quality of their AI assistants, or accept that the real support interface for customers is increasingly not the company's website but a third-party GenAI service.

What this means

Gartner's finding casts doubt on the return on the billions businesses have put into their own AI support bots: while companies compete to build branded assistants, customers have already voted with their feet for a simpler path, which is asking the AI they use every day anyway.

Frequently asked questions

How many customers did Gartner survey for this study?

Gartner surveyed 3566 customers about which tool they use to resolve service problems and support requests.

How many times more do customers prefer

ChatGPT to branded bots?

According to Gartner, people are roughly three times as likely to choose a third-party GenAI tool such as ChatGPT as the company's own chatbot when resolving a service problem.