AI Agents Shift Service Work as Banks Guard Money

Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier said a personal AI agent contacted service providers 37 times over four days and saved him $3,150. Businesses, meanwhile, are weighing which customer issues machines should handle and which still need a person. Eggemeier said he’d gone three or four years without contacting those companies before using the agent. Now he plans to have it check his cable, streaming, internet and family mobile plans monthly.

Who Handles the Work

"What's changing is the amount of interactions is just going to explode," Eggemeier told Newsweek. He said Zendesk sees interaction volume rising among customers with the heaviest AI adoption. Automated service can run around the clock and in languages that businesses may once have supported only during limited hours.

Companies must decide which issues stay self-service, which AI can handle and where a person’s judgment or company policy is needed. Eggemeier said businesses should assess whether automation improves service, not just how much work the technology handles. "If you're getting higher resolution rates, but lower satisfaction, that is gonna impact your business in the future," he said.

Measures can vary from one interaction to another. Eggemeier said they may include whether an issue gets resolved, money gets collected or a sale gets made, alongside customer satisfaction. He said chief executives should weigh those outcomes together.

Customers may increasingly seek help through personal agents or interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude instead of a company website or support tool, Eggemeier said. That could mean fewer website visits and less human-to-human contact. Businesses would still need to protect their information and customer experience when another AI system sits between them and customers. "I don't think closed ecosystems are gonna work that well," he said.

Voice, Access and Limits

A separate Newsweek analysis said businesses should prepare for customers who speak rather than type. A June 2026 YouTube video cited in the analysis featured Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, saying roughly half his engineering work now happened on his phone. He said he could manage AI agents remotely and direct them by voice while walking in the woods, getting coffee 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 can listen and respond at the same time, handle interruptions and delegate complex work during a conversation. xAI's Grok Voice 2.0 emphasized speech-to-speech conversations, transcription and tool use, and Tesla recently added it to cars for hands-free interaction.

A 2026 study of more than 10,000 U.S. adults published in Scientific Reports found median typing speeds, adjusted for errors, of 37.8 words per minute on computers and 29.4 on smartphones. NCVS put the standard benchmark for general American English conversational speech at about 150 words per minute. The analysis also cited limits: voice can fail in noisy settings, misunderstand instructions or raise privacy concerns when people speak sensitive information aloud. Typing remains useful for detailed writing, precise editing and tasks that benefit from visual control.

The analysis described Model Context Protocol, or MCP, as a way to connect directly to major AI language models and build voice experiences for websites and calls. A customer could ask a website a question, receive a spoken answer, schedule an appointment, get a text link, make a payment or connect to a representative. The piece, written by Thomas Ryan, founder and CEO of Bigly Sales and founder of Talk Kit, urged businesses to test voice AI on real customer tasks and measure completion and satisfaction before expanding it.

Investment, Labor and Financial Control

A Wharton and GBK Collective study reported that 67 percent of enterprise leaders whose departments had fully embedded AI, adopted agents and significantly redesigned workflows said they had strongly positive return on investment. The figure was 19 percent among leaders whose departments had not.

Aisata Diallo, 24, started braiding other people's hair during college at Northeastern University in Boston, where she found limited access to braiders and textured-hair specialists. She said a single hairstyle can take eight hours, and professionals may experience cramping and carpal tunnel syndrome after long days standing and weaving. "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.

Diallo later developed Tressfecta, a company making products for textured hair. Its first project, Plait Pilot, is a tool intended to separate hair from packs before braiding, a process that can take hours, particularly for small braids. Tressfecta was still pre-launch and working on a prototype. Diallo had bootstrapped the company and used grant and accelerator funding; she said she was preparing to fundraise and connecting with stylists and braiders to test the product.

In finance, Charles Schwab Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wurster said his brokerage, wealth-management and banking company actively blocks unauthorized AI agents attempting to move clients' money, including Meta Platforms Inc.'s Muse. The report said bank executives welcome consumers' use of AI to support their financial lives as long as agents follow the rules.