Being unable to reach a customer service representative the moment you encounter a problem feels almost archaic. And yet, 24/7 assistance only became the norm some 30 years ago, when globalization and the internet drastically transformed our expectation for around-the-clock customer service.
Now, the industry is evolving again. This time around, artificial intelligence is redefining the way businesses connect with their customers.
This year, 85 percent of customer service leaders will explore or pilot a customer-facing conversational generative AI solution, a December survey from Gartner, a research and advisory firm focused on business and technology, found. Respondents also identified customer service leaders as having more responsibility than their IT counterparts when it comes to driving adoption, identifying new AI opportunities and road-mapping the evolution of AI activities.
The industry’s path ahead, however, remains uncertain. For some, like Pipeliner CRM’s Nikolaus Kimla, it’s humans who need to drive machine learning forward. For others, like Intercom’s Eoghan McCabe, it’s the capabilities themselves that will shape the future of customer service.
This year, both Intercom and Pipeliner CRM were recognized for their customer service innovations as part of Newsweek’s AI Impact Awards 2025. Customer service was just one of more than a dozen industries recognized with 38 winners chosen by a panel of AI and subject matter experts.
“Winning the Newsweek AI Impact Award is both an honor and a powerful validation of the vision we’ve held at Pipeliner from the very beginning,” Kimla, CEO of the customer relationship management software company, told Newsweek. “This reinforces the idea that technology, especially AI, should serve to elevate people, not replace them.”
Newsweek Illustration
Pipeliner CRM received the Best Outcomes, Analyzing Customer Data award for its 2024 launch of Voyager AI Assistant Gen II. The second generation of the tool aims to help sales team by automating time-consuming tasks, like data analysis and reporting, but it was still built with Pipeliner CRM’s core values of “human empowerment, transparency and usability” in mind.
“Innovation at Pipeliner always serves people first,” Kimla said. “Our AI is built not to replace the salesperson but to support them, offering intuitive insights without adding complexity.”
Kimla said because many AI tools often end up overwhelming users with excessive data, Pipeliner CRM sought to ensure that their assistant would serve sales teams without “adding friction.”
So far, the response to Voyager AI Assistant Gen II have been positive.
Kimla said he was surprised by how quickly sales professionals embraced the tool once they realized its ability to help them work smarter and close deals faster. Metrics from Pipeliner CRM also show that the AI led to a 30 percent reduction in time spent on administration tasks, as well as an increase in lead conversion rates. The platform’s CEO said teams that use Voyager Recommend to surface upsell and cross-sell opportunities have seen lead conversion rise by 20 to 40 percent.
“AI’s future in customer service is about becoming a proactive partner, understanding context and emotion to deliver personalized support while enabling human agents to handle complex issues,” Kimla said. “At Pipeliner, we’re dedicated to developing AI that strengthens human connection, not replaces it.”
Customer service leaders who want to implement AI successfully should “avoid chasing the hype and stay grounded in your core values.”
“Make sure your AI enhances the human element, not erases it,” Kimla advised. “If you do that, you’ll build not only a better product but a more loyal and empowered customer base.”
McCabe, on the other hand, sees a customer service future that is going to be driven more by what AI is capable of than what humans want AI to accomplish.
“We’ll reach a point where AI can do more service than the company, the business, the brand, wants to do,” McCabe, the CEO of Intercom, told Newsweek.
Intercom won the Best Outcomes, Customer Satisfaction award for the development of Fin 2, the latest iteration of Intercom’s customer service AI agent. Built on proprietary in-house AI technology, Fin was designed so that companies could coach, train and monitor their AI customer service just like they would their human team members.
McCabe said the biggest innovation with the newest generation of Fin is the AI’s ability to pull disparate pieces of information and synthesize an answer, much like a human service representative can. In practice, that means a customer who ordered a package to the wrong address could not only find out if delivery is available in various states, but have that package rerouted to a different address entirely.
“It’s these pivotal steps, these big leaps forward” that distinguish each iteration from the next, McCabe said.
According to Fin’s resolution rates (the percentage of problems that the agent can solve), Intercom’s AI has been extraordinarily successful. Fin 2 now resolves up to 91 percent of a business’s total customer support volume and reaches an average of 56 percent resolution rate, up from 23 percent in the previous version. McCabe added that while 56 percent is the average resolution rate, that number can get as high as 80 percent for many of Intercom’s customers. Some are even approaching 90 percent.
The success of Fin 2 is also reflected in Intercom’s portfolio of customers. Among the clients: Anthropic, one of the market’s fastest-growing AI startups and the company behind Claude.
“We’re now solving tens of thousands of customer queries [for Anthropic]. We’ve saved their human support teams thousands of hours,” McCabe said. “Fin is now involved in 96 percent of their support conversations.”
“Anthropic is one of the most sophisticated and successful AI labs in the world, and the fact that they’re using Fin to do their service, as opposed to using their own AI speaks volumes,” he said.
McCabe attributes Intercom’s success to its early investment in AI. While other companies did not begin hiring AI scientists and engineers in response to the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, Intercom was already ahead, having staffed an AI team for many years before. Today, Intercom has 47 highly-experienced senior AI engineers, scientists and researchers.
“It’s a product of this AI group,” McCabe said. “If you look at any of our direct competitors, they don’t have the level of sophistication and seniority and scale that we have.”
Despite his eagerness in seeing how AI will guide humans on how to implement new capabilities, McCabe forecasts that human agents will be around for at least another decade and acknowledged that human beings are never going to cease real-life interactions. Still, he believes there will come a time where agents will be so ubiquitous, humans will no longer realize they’re even there.
“Agents will be used strategically and deliberately, even when they’re not needed, because there will be value,” he said. “So, that’s something that we get to reckon with in the future. But that’s a bit of ways away.”
To see the full list of AI Impact winners, visit the official page for Newsweek’s AI Impact Awards.
Newsweek will continue the conversation on meaningful AI innovations at our AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25 in Sonoma, California. Click here to follow along on the live blog.