Customer service at a crossroads: Why build ‘faster horses’ when what you need is a car? – News

Henry Ford is often credited with saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This statement remains one of the most powerful warnings against incremental thinking. Optimizing for what already exists rarely delivers transformation. Especially when all signs point to the fact that it is failing.

Customer service is at its own “faster horses vs. automobiles” moment.

Companies are investing millions into making chatbots less frustrating, escalation processes less clumsy, and handoffs to live agents less painful. Yet the foundational model, one that relies on your customers grappling with a self-service bot in the hopes that they will eventually get escalated to a real human, is itself broken. It treats service as a solo act until failure, forcing the customer to endure unnecessary friction before real help arrives.

Escalation is not the answer. It’s the disease.

The flawed premise of escalation

According to the 2025 CCW Digital Special Report: Omnichannel AI Agents, only 29% of consumers believe artificial intelligence is actually improving their service experience. That’s because most AI systems are built as stopgaps: digital speedbumps between the customer and a human who can actually help.

Escalation creates inefficiency on both sides. Customers must repeat information and retell their story, while human agents inherit problems cold, forced to reconstruct context before they can act. By that point, frustration has set in. Handle times rise, costs increase and customer loyalty erodes.

The problem isn’t technology; it’s design. Businesses are still asking for “faster horses” — for example, smarter bots, smoother escalations — instead of reimagining what service could be if AI were built on a new foundation.

From escalation to advocacy

The next evolution in AI-powered service isn’t about replacing humans; it’s about creating AI teammates that collaborate with them. The model shifts from escalation, where a bot eventually fails and hands off the problem, to advocacy, where AI works alongside humans to ensure the customer’s issue is resolved from start to finish.

In this model, called AI advocacy, AI maintains full situational awareness of the customer’s journey. When human input is needed, the AI doesn’t abandon the conversation. Rather, it consults a human agent behind the scenes only when their specific expertise is needed, preserving context of the situation.

The agent never needs to reconstruct the customer’s full journey, they can simply answer the one thing that the AI advocate doesn’t know yet. Then the AI advocate picks right back up with the customer. No handoffs or escalations.

This collaboration eliminates the cognitive burden that plagues both sides. Customers never have to start over. Agents never need to dig through transcripts or notes. Service becomes continuous rather than fragmented, a single conversation rather than a chain of disjointed interactions.

From hammers to orchestras

Too often, companies treat AI like a hammer, expecting it to pound away at every service problem in the same way. But service isn’t a nail. It’s an orchestra in which different instruments play their part, and the ultimate experience depends on harmony.

In an AI advocacy-based model, AI acts as the conductor. It ensures that the right expertise comes in at the right time, that systems stay synchronized, and that the customer hears one coherent performance rather than a series of disconnected solos. Instead of optimizing a flawed process, advocacy reimagines service as orchestration, where technology and people operate in concert, not competition.

The business payoff: Cost savings of automation + loyalty dividends of trust

The benefits of this model are profound, but the reasons are often misunderstood. The value isn’t that humans suddenly gain full context; it’s that they no longer need it.

In a traditional escalation, each new agent must absorb the entire history of an interaction before responding. In an advocacy framework, AI carries that history, maintaining the thread, anticipating what’s next, presenting humans with only what’s necessary, and automatically updating all systems behind the scenes.

Consider the reality of a long, emotionally charged customer experience: hours spent waiting for a delivery, a delayed flight, a technical outage. The customer asks the same question in different ways, at different times, often through different channels. In the old model, each time a human steps in, they start cold, and the customer re-explains everything.

In the advocacy model, the AI carries the continuity. The human agent only answers the rare question that the AI may not know, and the AI uses that answer to respond to the customer and keep the experience moving forward.

This simple shift reduces handle times, increases concurrency, and eliminates the stop-and-start frustration that ultimately leads to human escalations which have long defined customer service. Customers feel supported rather than stranded. Human agents experience less fatigue from answering the same questions repeatedly and more satisfaction by being consulted only when their expertise is truly needed. Organizations benefit from both the cost savings of automation and the loyalty dividends of customer trust.

Real-world results already show dramatic improvements in response times, resolution rates and customer satisfaction, not because the AI is faster or smarter, but because the relationship between humans and AI has been redesigned.

The future belongs to advocates

If the industry keeps building AI around the escalation model, it will keep producing incrementally faster and smarter horses: marginal improvements to a broken journey. But if it embraces AI advocacy, it can build something entirely new: a service model where AI doesn’t replace humans or offload problems onto them, but stands beside, always on behalf of the customer.

In the coming years, customers won’t remember which companies built the slickest bots or the most polished escalation flows. They’ll remember which companies gave them an advocate, one that stayed with them until their problem was solved.

The future of customer service isn’t about faster horses. It’s about AI advocacy. And those who embrace it will redefine what it means to truly serve.

Doug Marinaro is co-founder and chief executive of Riptide, a San Francisco-based company pioneering AI-powered customer advocacy. He wrote this article for News.

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