2025 saw some huge developmental leaps in Generative AI with the release of GPT-5 in August 2025.[*] As AI and NLP have improved in speed, reasoning, memory, and linguistic and emotional nuance, chatbots are able to handle more operations than ever before.
By 2029, the chatbot market is expected to grow to 20.81 billion dollars.[*]
Performing advanced customer service functions like giving customers recommendations - chatbots can also pull off feats like scheduling, canceling appointments, taking payments, and even refilling prescriptions in the healthcare field - to name a few possibilities.
Chatbots can work in any customer service environment, particularly looking to assist in reducing things like high call volumes in contact centers. If contact center management wants to extend convenient customer service options to relieve the stress felt by agents, they're likely already sold on the idea of chatbots.
2025 saw many companies adopting a hybrid agent-chatbot model with AI-powered chatbots handling almost all interactions after-hours and escalating to human agents when necessary.[*]
OpenAI and ChatGPT
Founded in 2015, OpenAI has been everywhere as of late. Contact center software and customer service (CX) software developers have been all over the technology. In August 2025, OpenAI released ChatGPT 5 with better reasoning, memory retention, and a more natural sounding voice.
Nearly every 'major' and non-major player in the UCC space has either added ChatGPT to their roster of capabilities, hoping to boost their CX capabilities, or has developed their own LLM.
In June 2025, Zoom announced an enhanced virtual agent (Virtual Agent 2.0) powered by agentic AI. Zoom's Virtual Agent 2.0 has multi-intent detection, advanced reasoning, context aware conversations, and deeper CRM integration capabilities for omnichannel customer support.
Automate, Automate, Automate
While many fear that AI will eventually replace humans at their job, most companies are investing in hybrid human-virtual agent models that enable humans to focus on relationship building and complex, multi-faceted tasks, while chatbots handle repetative and after-hours work.
From answering queries about products to extending post-sale support, chatbots (and voice bots) are seemingly invaluable. They can work to collect data from customers, along with ensuring a quality experience if the logic is sound. Companies can even leverage chatbots for onboarding and automating tasks involved in that process: be it a new customer or employee.
There is also no risk of human error, and bots can handle multiple customers simultaneously. And that is all automated - (freeing up) human agents to perform higher-level customer service tasks, such as when a customer needs to speak to a human for any number of reasons.
Everything from e-commerce to healthcare, real estate, and various other industries might 'handsomely' benefit from reducing long response times, lack of follow-ups from human agents, and other downsides to relying solely on humans to perform CX within organizations.
Agentic AI-Powered Chatbots
Agentic AI agents enable greater autonomy and contextual awareness, leading to more engaging conversations over voice or text for customers.
In September 2025, Genesys announced agentic enhancements to Genesys Cloud Copilots and Genesys Cloud Virtual Agents. These agents have a fine-tuned LLM and the new enhancements will allow for more natural interactions, faster resolutions, and more language support- with Genesys adding 10 new languages to choose from for AI agents.
Omnichannel Chatbots
2025 saw a continuation of interest in self-service and a variety of communication channels such as email, messaging, and social media. Although voice seems to be making a slight comeback*, consumers are consistently choosing the speed and clarity of AI conversations when they have simple queries.[*]
In 2025, social media channels remained popular for customer service with 83% of marketers stating that they used Facebook for business. Instagram came in second place with 78% of marketers worldwide saying they used the social media platform to conduct business.[*]
In order to meet the demands of modern customers, it will be necessary for companies to implement omnichannel chatbots that can interact with consumers on a variety of channels and apps, elevating to live agents when necessary.
For example, Zapier recently released an omnichannel chatbot builder (still in Beta) that can be linked to multiple channels such as email, messaging apps, and social media. The chatbot serves as a central point for handling interactions across channels and supervisors can customize the chatbot's directive, add channel specific formatting, and more.
The Future of Chatbots
As chatbots leverage a model that trains and makes them better over time - the result is that the customer experience will only get better over time. In fact, Gartner predicts that 40% of GenAI solutions will be multimodal by 2027.[*] Meaning that AI-powered tools such as chatbots will be able to understand not only text, but also images, audio, and video clips. The potential for AI-powered self-service is limitless. When considering this, it seems only clever to implement such a tool now.
The fact is that chatbots are something that can help a business beyond what they could have ever imagined, it merely takes the imagination of creative folks to know how to use the technology best to enhance various experiences for both customers and customer service agents.
