Twilio, the San Francisco customer engagement software company, has released survey results showing a wide gap between how businesses rate their AI customer service and how consumers experience it. According to the report, 86% of companies believe customers are satisfied with their AI-powered service, while only 51% of consumers say those interactions are satisfactory.
The findings come from Twilio's 2026 Customer Insights Series, which surveyed 7,652 consumers and 660 business leaders across 18 markets, including the United States, between April 9 and May 1, 2026. Business respondents held director-level roles or higher at companies with 500 or more employees.
The report found that AI agents already handle half of customer service interactions, a share respondents expect to reach 63% by 2027. Transparency emerged as a point of friction. Some 76% of consumers want an AI agent to identify itself at the start of a conversation, yet only 32% of businesses treat AI transparency as a priority. In addition, 63% of consumers want a quick way to reach a live person at any time, and 78% said they have tried to get around an AI agent to reach a human.
Businesses acknowledged their own blind spots. Twilio said 99% of companies reported obstacles to fully understanding their customers, and 91% said satisfaction falls when AI makes errors such as losing the context of a conversation.
Chris Koehler, Twilio's chief marketing officer, framed the problem as one of measurement. "Right now, too many organizations are rating their AI on a scale that their customers aren't actually using," he said.
Consumer attitudes are not uniformly negative. The survey found 64% of consumers believe AI chatbots have improved over the past year, and 34% said they are more likely to choose a chatbot over a human agent than they were a year earlier.
Source: Business Wire -- https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261109879402/en/