What do the analysts actually predict?
Something narrower than the headline. Gartner’s December 2024 prediction is that by 2028, 30% of Fortune 500 companies will offer customer service through only a single channel enabled by AI 1. In its 2022 survey, Gartner found 54% of service organisations already using some form of chatbot or conversational AI and predicted chatbots would be the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organisations by 2027 3. Its August 2025 survey of customer-service leaders expects self-service and live chat to surpass phone and email as the top service technologies by 2027 2. None of those predictions is about voice agents replacing call centres.
Which way is the channel shift going?
Away from the phone. The pattern in every one of those surveys is that customers are choosing the channel that gives an answer without a queue: a chat window, a self-service page, an email that gets replied to. The phone call is the channel that requires the customer to wait, and the AI that matters is the one that removes the wait, not the one that imitates a human voice on the line.
| Channel | Direction by 2027, per Gartner 2 3 | What AI does there |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | Overtaken by self-service and chat | Voice bots exist; adoption trails chat |
| Live chat | Rising to a top channel | A chatbot first, a person on hand-over |
| Self-service | Rising to a top channel | Answers from the company’s own content |
| Overtaken, still large | An agent that classifies, drafts and escalates |
What about the call centre industry?
It is a large South African employer, and the honest answer is that the change arrives as a shift in what agents do rather than a switch that turns them off. The routine call, order status, opening hours, a password reset, is the call that moves to chat and self-service first. The call that needs a person, the complaint, the exception, the sale that needs persuading, stays. Stats SA’s Q4 2025 labour force survey puts official unemployment at 31.4% 4; nobody should pretend the shift is costless, and nobody should pretend it is not happening.
What should a small business do now?
Skip the voice bot. A small business does not have a call centre to replace; it has a phone that rings during a job and a website that is silent at night. The tools that address that are a website chatbot that answers within seconds, at any hour, and an email agent that clears the inbox and escalates the hard ones. Both are the channels the surveys say customers are moving to, and both are month to month.
Will voice agents matter eventually?
Probably, for the businesses whose customers insist on phoning. But the direction of the evidence is that customers, given a good chat or self-service option, stop phoning. The business that builds the good option does not need the voice bot, and the money it would have spent on one buys a year of the channels customers are actually moving to.
Questions people ask
Does DoubleDown AI sell a voice agent?
No. Our products are a website chatbot, an email agent, bookings, invoicing, lead generation, mass email, website design and custom builds. A voice agent would be a custom build, quoted from scope.
Can a chatbot handle a complaint?
It should not try. A good chatbot recognises a complaint and hands it to a person with the history attached; ours is built that way.
Is chat really replacing the phone in South Africa?
The surveys are global. Locally, the practical evidence is your own inbox: count how many enquiries arrive as messages versus calls, and when.
Sources
- Gartner, “Gartner Predicts that 30% of Fortune 500 Companies Will Offer Service Through Only a Single, AI-Enabled Channel by 2028”, press release, 11 December 2024
- Gartner, “Self-Service and Live Chat Will Surpass Traditional Channels as Top Customer Service Technologies by 2027”, press release, 27 August 2025
- Gartner, “Gartner Predicts Chatbots Will Become a Primary Customer Service Channel Within Five Years”, press release, 27 July 2022
- Statistics South Africa, “Quarterly Labour Force Survey, Q4 2025” (P0211)
Where we do this
If you are reading this from Umhlanga and East London, those pages go through the local version of it: which languages the bot needs, what the busy hours look like, and which sectors ask what.