In 2 years, half of all service calls will be resolved by AI - survey (www.zdnet.com)

Salesforce’s State of Service (7th edition), based on a survey of more than 6,500 service professionals, predicts that by 2027 half of all service cases will be resolved by AI—up from 30% in 2025—and finds 79% of service leaders view AI agent investment as essential. The report shows companies using predictive, generative, and agentic AI are already cutting costs, shortening case resolution times (expected ~20% reductions), and improving customer satisfaction. Adoption is driving hybrid workflows where AI handles routine tasks and augments humans on complex requests, boosting rep productivity, skills development, and job satisfaction. Key technical takeaways: 69% of teams use at least one AI type and 39% use agentic AI; top use cases include FAQs, order inquiries, conversation summaries, knowledge retrieval, and personalized recommendations. Success hinges on integration—teams with unified service-channel data are 1.4x more likely to rate AI deployments very successful—while silos and security concerns (75% of IT leaders warn of AI-driven threats) slow rollout. The report maps an “agentic maturity” path from RAG-style retrieval (Level 1) to transactional reasoning (Level 2) and system orchestration/action (Level 3), highlighting that moving up this ladder is critical for delivering autonomous experiences and realizing operational ROI.