An online survey across eighteen markets reports abandonment, repetition, disclosure expectations plus rising agent workloads among decision-makers, users
Based on a survey of 7,652 consumers and 660 business decision-makers across 18 countries conducted online between 9 April 2026 and 1 May 1 2026 on attitudes to AI-powered customer service, a customer engagement platform has shared some findings on Asia Pacific respondents’ experiences with AI agents with the media.
The “Asia Pacific” cohort reflected responses from consumers and business decision-makers in parts of the region: Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.
First, 70% of the Asia Pacific consumer respondents had indicated that they had abandoned at least one AI-powered customer service interaction because the system lacked basic information about them or about their previous interactions, and 5% of these respondents had indicated that they had stopped using the brand involved following such an experience.
Second, among the business respondents of the APAC cohort overseeing customer experience, marketing technology or customer data strategies, 84% had indicated a belief that their AI agents effectively recognized returning customers and retained conversational histories, while 70% of consumer respondents in the same region had indicated that they often had to restart conversations from the beginning when opening a new query with an AI agent.
Other findings
Third, 65% of the Asia Pacific consumer respondents had indicated that they had needed to repeat themselves or fill in information gaps after an AI chatbot transferred their case to a human agent, suggesting that the handoff flows reported in the survey had not consistently preserved conversational context at the time of the fieldwork. Also among the APAC cohort:
- 70% had indicated that AI agents should identify themselves at the start of every conversation, while 22% of Asia Pacific business respondents had indicated that their organizations’ AI agents did so.
- 68% had indicated that the AI bots they interacted with over the previous year had improved, and 65% had indicated that they wanted AI agents from different companies to communicate directly with one another when such coordination could resolve issues more quickly.
- 58% had indicated that they wanted the option to switch to a human agent on request, 57% had indicated that they wanted AI actions to require human approval, and 51% had indicated that they wanted visibility into the customer data accessible to AI systems.
- Among the respondents, expectations reported in the survey were that AI agents would handle 65% of customer service interactions by 2027, compared with 52% of interactions that respondents had estimated were handled by AI agents at the time of the survey; 91% had indicated that their organizations were building AI workflows intended to provide proactive support before customers made contact.
- The findings were based on self-reported experiences and estimates by respondents at the time of the April–May 2026 fieldwork, using online panels in the 18 markets covered.
According to Robert Woolfrey, Vice President (Asia Pacific and Japan), Twilio, the firm that shared its survey data findings, “AI is only as helpful as the context you feed it. By connecting customer data, brands can [move beyond] basic chatbots to assistants that [maintain more consistent context across interactions]. [Doing so can help reduce] situations where consumers have to repeat their issues, [and support] conversations that pick up where they left off.”
