UAE enterprises are using AI as a cover story, and consumers are paying the price
A new ServiceNow report has found that UAE citizens and residents collectively lose more than 83 million hours a year to poor customer service, equivalent to over 10 million working days, with every consumer in the country absorbing an average of 10.8 hours annually in hold times, repeated information, and unresolved issues.
ServiceNow’s The CX Shift: Customer Expectations in the AI Era, published on 7 April 2026, surveyed 34,000 executives, service representatives, and customers across 18 countries, including 1,335 UAE respondents, in partnership with research firm ThoughtLab.
The headline number, however, is not the most uncomfortable finding. UAE executives know their customers want empathy - their data shows they have chosen not to prioritise it. Lack of empathy is the top frustration cited by UAE consumers, flagged by 55% of respondents. Only 24% of UAE executives identify empathy as a priority.
That 31% point gap is consistent across the research: 50% of UAE consumers cite frustration at being transferred between departments, yet only 36% of executives regard inter-departmental handoffs as a significant problem.
Speed, efficiency, and 24/7 availability are easy to quantify and easy to present to a board. Empathy is not. In environments under pressure to implement AI, where Gartner found in October 2025 that 91% of customer service leaders globally faced exactly that pressure, the metrics that travel upward tend to be the ones that suit the investment narrative.
AI as alibi
Almost two-thirds of UAE consumers (62%) say AI has improved customer service, and 60% credit it with better after-hours availability. Those are genuine gains. They are also the gains most legible to an AI investment thesis: speed, round-the-clock access, and deflection rates. What they do not address is the structural failure underneath.
Fewer than half of UAE organisations (46%) have integrated data across silos into a single source of truth. Less than one in five (19%) have enterprise-wide AI strategies that cross departmental lines. Service agents in the UAE spend just 44% of their working week on customer issues, with the remainder consumed by administrative tasks, system navigation, and information retrieval. In the UAE, 73% of service representatives must log into three to five separate platforms to resolve a single customer query. AI has been layered on top of these workflows rather than used to rebuild them.
The pattern is documented beyond the UAE. A 2025 study by Glance surveying more than 600 consumers found that 75% were left frustrated by AI customer service, reporting more loops, dead ends, and repeated explanations than before automation investment increased. Gartner, analysing a separate cohort of 321 customer service leaders in October 2025, found that only 20% of organisations had actually reduced agent headcount through AI. The majority reported stable staffing because they were handling more volume, not because AI was resolving more. Cost reduction and experience improvement are being conflated in executive reporting, and customers are absorbing the difference.
"Consumers across EMEA are losing entire working days to service experiences that should take minutes. The root cause is not a lack of AI investment; it is that most CRM systems were built to record interactions, not resolve them," said Shakira Talbot, Group Vice President, CRM EMEA at ServiceNow.
The ServiceNow research adds a precise regional figure to a global argument: across EMEA, customer issues take an average of three to four days to resolve in sectors including banking and telecommunications. In manufacturing, resolution times stretch to nearly a full working week. Even in the technology industry, less than one in five customer service issues are resolved within an hour. AI has not meaningfully accelerated these timelines because it has been deployed on top of fragmented workflows rather than rebuilt around them.
The 89% problem
Perhaps the sharpest illustration of the disconnect between enterprise AI strategy and actual consumer behaviour is a single channel statistic: 89% of UAE consumers still prefer to resolve service issues over the phone. Only 6% of UAE executives plan to prioritise voice channels over the next three years.
That divergence carries particular weight in the Gulf context, where relationship-oriented service expectations are embedded in commercial culture in ways that digital-first frameworks developed elsewhere do not map onto cleanly. The ServiceNow data suggests that UAE enterprises are not deploying AI to serve the consumer they have. They are building infrastructure for the consumer they would prefer: digitally native, self-service-willing, and comfortable with chatbots that currently fail 47% of users who attempt them.
The self-service picture is internally contradictory. While 80% of UAE consumers attempt self-service before speaking to an agent, suggesting genuine openness to digital resolution, 47% report that chatbots fail to understand their questions. That is not a consumer adoption problem. It is a product quality problem. Customers are willing to use the channels organisations have built; the channels are not performing well enough to retain them.
Gartner has projected that regulatory changes around AI will increase the volume of customer service contacts requiring human agents by 30% by 2028, as more consumers exercise the right to speak to a person rather than an automated system. For UAE enterprises currently deprioritising voice and human-facing channels, that projection represents a significant forward risk.
The cost of the gap
The commercial stakes are not abstract. In the UAE, 45% of consumers say a single poor or slow experience is sufficient reason to switch to a competitor. Close to half of UAE executives (48%) report high customer churn from poor service experiences.
The causal chain is visible in the data, yet only 36% of UAE organisations have optimised their CRM systems to unify issue resolution across the customer lifecycle, and only 38% have made significant progress connecting people, data, and processes through AI-enabled workflows.
"Customers want to feel heard and resolved, not just routed. But that cannot happen when AI and human agents operate in different systems with different views of the customer," Talbot said. "The organisations getting this right are the ones connecting their entire operation, front office to back office, on a single platform."
That argument is also ServiceNow's commercial pitch, and it is worth naming it as such. The research was commissioned by the company, and its conclusions point directly at ServiceNow's product positioning. The data, however, was collected by independent research firm ThoughtLab to ISO 20252 standards across 34,000 respondents, and its core findings on the executive-consumer perception gap are consistent with Gartner, Glance, and Intercom research conducted independently over the same period.
What the convergence of those sources describes is an enterprise sector that has found in AI a sufficiently credible narrative to defer harder organisational decisions: breaking down departmental silos, consolidating fragmented data environments, and rebuilding service processes from resolution backwards rather than from cost reduction forwards. In the UAE, where national AI targets and digital transformation are embedded in government policy, the gap between enterprise AI investment and consumer-facing service quality is not just a commercial liability. It is a test of whether technology adoption is driving genuine operational change, or functioning primarily as a story organisations tell about themselves.