Will AI mean the end of the road for my customer service career? (www.techradar.com)

AI is reshaping customer service rather than ending careers: routine, scripted tasks are increasingly automated by chatbots and “agentic” AI (55% of organizations report using agentic AI in service), but humans remain essential for complex, empathetic, and strategic work (64% of customers still prefer human service). AI excels at triage, status updates, routing and self-service, freeing agents to focus on high-value outcomes—turning service into a growth engine measured by retention and revenue impact rather than ticket volume. Practical hybrid examples include agents using NLP-driven triage and AI-powered inventory search or route optimization to resolve emotionally fraught cases faster and more creatively. Technically, companies must tailor and train models on domain-specific, high-quality data—especially unstructured voice and conversational logs—to make AI truly effective, creating demand for CX/CS data analysts who can capture, clean, and connect interaction data to models. The implications for workers: upskill in empathy, critical thinking, data literacy, and process design so they can supervise models, refine AI behavior, enable personalization and predictive analytics, and translate insights into business value. In short, AI is a partner that reallocates human effort to higher-skill, higher-impact customer experience roles rather than eliminating them.