AI in Customer Support: What End Users Really Think in 2025

In the race to automate customer service, one voice is often underrepresented: the end user. We often discuss efficiency, cost savings, and ticket deflection, but what about the person on the other end of the screen? The 2025 Intercom AI End-User Sentiment Report provides a unique and timely insight into the user experience of interacting with AI.

Based on a comprehensive survey of over 1,000 consumers across the US and UK, the report dives deep into what people love, fear, and expect when AI becomes their first point of contact. For support teams, CX strategists, and AI platform builders, it’s a must-read.

Let’s unpack the most powerful takeaways and what they mean for the future of AI-first support.

Key Findings

Users Want Speed, But Not at Any Cost

One of the clearest messages from the report is this: people are not anti-AI. In fact, when done well, they prefer AI support for one simple reason - speed. Discover why speed matters for customer support.

• 66% of users said that getting faster answers is their top priority when interacting with support.
• 42% prefer AI if it means quicker resolutions.

However, speed alone isn’t enough. If AI gives irrelevant, robotic, or inaccurate answers, trust erodes quickly. And that’s where most frustrations begin.

One of the biggest barriers to mainstream AI adoption in customer support is trust. The report makes it clear: hallucinations, when AI gives confident but incorrect answers, are a top concern. Discover everything about AI hallucinations.

In fact, only 20% of users fully trust AI to provide correct answers consistently. That means 4 out of 5 users are skeptical, and that skepticism grows with every inaccurate reply.

Over half of respondents reported encountering incomplete, misleading, or outright wrong responses from AI-powered systems. These frustrating experiences break user confidence fast.

Once trust is broken, people stop engaging with the assistant and hit the “Talk to a human” button. That’s a direct hit to the very efficiency and deflection goals companies hope AI will achieve.

This isn’t just a technical flaw — it’s a customer experience issue. If your AI can’t be relied on to give the right answer at the right time, it becomes a liability rather than a solution.

To combat this, modern solutions like CoSupport AI are engineered to prevent hallucinations through deep knowledge retrieval, custom tone training, and strict source grounding, making sure that every response is not only accurate but brand-safe.

Trust = Transparency + Accuracy

The report highlights a growing user sophistication. People want AI to help, but they expect transparency about what AI can and can’t do.

Key outcome:

• 81% want to know when they are speaking to a bot.
• 53% are more likely to trust AI if it explains how it got its answers.
• 71% want the option to escalate to a human at any time.

This gives us a blueprint for design: clarity, confidence, and control. Customers are open to AI, but they want it to be honest, factual, and easy to override.

Younger Audiences = Higher Expectations

Younger users (18–34) are both more open and more demanding of AI:

• More likely to trust AI to resolve their issues.
• Less forgiving when AI fails.
• Expect natural, human-like responses that adapt to tone and urgency.

For EdTech, e-commerce, SaaS, and fintech companies, this demographic shift is massive. They’re not asking “Should I trust AI?”, they’re asking “Why is this AI so bad?”

Human + AI > Human or AI

The most interesting trend? Users are warming up to the hybrid model, where AI handles the basics and a human jumps in when needed.

• 68% prefer AI to handle routine questions.
• 79% are happy if AI saves them from waiting in a long queue.
• But only 18% are okay with AI being the only option.

This reinforces a clear truth: the best AI support isn’t about replacing people, it’s about optimizing the flow of work. A well-configured AI should know its limits, handle what it’s trained for, and escalate when human judgment is needed.

What happens when users see AI in action?

After just one demo, trust in AI jumped by 18 percentage points. Expectations for accuracy and faster resolutions skyrocketed.

Think AI can only answer FAQs? Let's check the full spectrum of AI Agents capabilities.

What This Means for Support Teams

If your current support AI is built to deflect, rather than to assist meaningfully, the report should be a wake-up call. The support experience must evolve:

• Train AI on real customer data, not generic knowledge.
• Focus on hallucination prevention, not just confidence scores.
• Let users know it’s a bot—but one they can trust.
• Build AI that can prepare the ticket, even if it doesn’t solve it.

That’s how trust is built, not just through automation, but through accuracy, clarity, and seamless fallback.

How CoSupport AI Aligns With the Report Findings

At CoSupport AI, these challenges are not news, they’re the reason our platform exists.

Here’s how we address the concerns raised in the Intercom report:

• No Hallucinations: Our AI is trained only on your content—past tickets, help center articles, CRM data—so it doesn’t invent answers.
• Tone-Matched Replies: We customize the AI’s tone and voice to sound like your team. From playful to professional, it matches the experience you want to deliver.
• Transparent, Controllable AI: Users always know it’s a bot. Agents can take over at any point, and all responses are logged with reasoning.
• Real Results: Up to 70–90% deflection rate on repetitive questions and 99%+ accuracy on trained topics.
• Fast onboarding: Go live in under a week.
• Deep integrations: with tools like Freshdesk, Zendesk, and custom CRM systems.

Final Thoughts: AI That’s Actually Helpful

If there’s one thing the Intercom report makes clear, it’s this: users want AI to succeed. But only if we build it right.

The opportunity is huge. Brands that invest in accurate, empathetic, and hybrid-ready AI will not only reduce support costs, they’ll create better experiences that scale.

With CoSupport AI, we’re not just building chatbots. We’re creating AI teammates that customers actually like talking to.