AI Agents Reshape Customer Service and Finance

Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier says customer-service interactions are about to surge, and he has the receipts to prove it. He recently asked a personal AI agent to renegotiate his cable, streaming, internet and family mobile plans. Over four days, the agent contacted providers 37 times and saved him $3,150. That’s a lot of calls no one had to make.

The Human Side of the Shift

Eggemeier admitted he’d gone three or four years without contacting those companies. Most people know the feeling: bills creep up, hold music plays, and the effort hardly seems worthwhile. A personal agent changes that calculation, especially for people who lack the time, patience or confidence to push back on a provider.

“What’s changing is the amount of interactions is just going to explode,” Eggemeier told Newsweek. He said Zendesk sees interaction volume rising fastest among customers with the heaviest AI adoption. Automated service can run around the clock and in languages businesses once supported only during limited hours. For customers who’ve waited through a working day for help that never came, that’s a real gain.

Where Human Judgment Still Matters

Eggemeier drew clear lines. “I think there’s certain situations where you want more empathy and you’re not looking for the quickest decision,” he said. He added, “On the other hand, if I’m getting in a kind of circle loop with an AI agent and I’m not getting it solved, I want the ability to go to a human being.” Companies, he argued, need to decide which issues stay self-service, which AI can handle, and where a person must make the call.

He also warned against judging automation by how much work it absorbs. “If you’re getting higher resolution rates, but lower satisfaction, that is gonna impact your business in the future,” he said. Success measures vary by interaction: resolving an issue, collecting money or closing a sale. Eggemeier said chief executives should consider those outcomes alongside customer satisfaction, not chase efficiency numbers alone.

Customers may increasingly seek help through personal agents or interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude instead of company websites or support tools, he said. That could mean less human-to-human contact and fewer visits to company sites. “I don’t think closed ecosystems are gonna work that well,” he said.

Talking Instead of Typing

A separate Newsweek analysis argued that businesses should prepare for customers who talk rather than type. It cited a June 2026 YouTube video in which Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, said roughly half his engineering work now happened on his phone. He could manage AI agents remotely and direct them by voice while walking in the woods or sitting on a couch.

OpenAI reported that more than 150 million people use ChatGPT through Voice and Dictation each week. Its July 2026 launch of GPT-Live introduced voice functions that let the system listen and respond simultaneously, handle interruptions and delegate complex work during a conversation. xAI’s Grok Voice 2.0 emphasized speech-to-speech conversations and was recently added to Tesla cars for hands-free interaction.

The analysis cited a 2026 study of more than 10,000 U.S. adults published in Scientific Reports. It found median typing speeds, adjusted for errors, of 37.8 words per minute on computers and 29.4 on smartphones. NCVS puts the standard benchmark for general American English conversational speech at about 150 words per minute. Voice can help when typing isn’t feasible. But it can fail in noisy settings, misunderstand instructions or expose sensitive information when spoken aloud. The analysis argued that technology should give users a choice.

Thomas Ryan, founder and CEO of Bigly Sales and founder of Talk Kit, wrote that businesses should test voice AI on real customer tasks, measure completion and satisfaction, and expand only when performance beats the status quo. Those guardrails make sense, especially when the customer on the other end has little leverage.

Financial Safeguards and Enterprise Returns

In finance, Charles Schwab Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wurster said his firm is actively blocking unauthorized AI agents attempting to move clients’ money, including Meta Platforms Inc.’s Muse. Bank executives, he indicated, welcome consumers’ use of AI to support their financial lives as long as agents follow the rules. That oversight keeps a convenience tool from becoming a theft tool.

Newsweek also reported that a Wharton and GBK Collective study found 67 percent of enterprise leaders whose departments had fully embedded AI, adopted agents and significantly redesigned workflows reported strongly positive return on investment. Only 19 percent of those that had not reported the same. The gap suggests gains go to organizations that reorganize their work. Workers and customers deserve a say in how that reorganization happens.

A Small Business Answering a Gap

Aisata Diallo, 24, started braiding her own hair as a child and began braiding for others while studying at Northeastern University in Boston. She found limited access to braiders and textured-hair specialists, then built a small business to fill the void. She said one hairstyle can take eight hours, and professionals may suffer cramping and carpal tunnel syndrome after long days standing and weaving hair. “I stopped braiding, and one of the reasons that I stopped braiding was due to the physical toll it has on your body,” she said.

Her company, Tressfecta, is developing Plait Pilot, a tool meant to separate hair from packs before braiding—a step that can take hours. The company remains pre-launch and is working on a prototype. Diallo bootstrapped the business and drew on grant and accelerator funding. “I am preparing to fundraise,” she said, noting how difficult it is to raise money for hardware, especially beauty hardware. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said of the technical challenge. She attended TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 in San Francisco during the week.

Why This Matters:

AI agents will reshape who gets good service and who gets left waiting. A personal agent that saves a household $3,150 is a real gain, but it depends on access to the technology, and not every family has it. Eggemeier’s warnings about escalation paths matter: a customer stuck in an automated loop has no leverage at all. Schwab’s decision to block unauthorized agents shows that institutions still have to enforce financial protections; consumers can’t be left to police them alone. The Wharton study’s 19 percent figure points to uneven returns, making public and regulatory attention to how these tools are deployed, and whom they serve, warranted. Workers, small business owners like Diallo and ordinary customers all have a stake in ensuring automation expands opportunity instead of shifting costs onto those with the least power to object.