Artificial intelligence is increasingly reshaping how businesses interact with customers, but a new Better Business Bureau (BBB) study finds most consumers aren’t happy about it.
The BBB’s 2026 AI Customer Service Scam Study, released last week by BBB chapters nationwide — including the BBB serving the Greater Iowa, Quad Cities and Siouxland Region — found that over 90% of BBB customer reviews mentioning AI services expressed a negative experience.
The study is based on more than 100,000 complaints, reviews and Scam Tracker reports mentioning artificial intelligence and automation that the BBB has received over the past three years. Of nearly 20,000 business reviews mentioning AI since 2023, more than 90% indicated negative sentiment, according to the report.
Common consumer complaints included confusion and frustration with an inability to resolve issues, along with a sense of being ignored or left behind when unable to reach a human representative. Many of the AI- and automation-related complaints came from the online retail, e-commerce and tech-forward industries.
The findings echo a joint poll by Hubspot and SurveyMonkey, cited in the BBB report, which surveyed more than 1,800 business leaders and nearly 16,000 consumers. That poll found 82% of people prefer to connect with a human for support even when wait times are the same — a preference that grows stronger with age, reaching 91% among respondents 61 and older. The same poll found only 30% of consumers say they trust AI “completely or a lot,” even when they do use it.
The BBB’s International Investigations Initiative (III), which has tracked scam and business trends since 2021, conducted the study as part of its ongoing work analyzing patterns of consumer harm. Previous studies from the initiative have examined job scams, business scams, online gambling, vehicle purchases and identity theft.
The report also flagged a rise in AI-related scams. BBB data shows scam reports connected to AI grew from 782 in 2023 to 2,972 in 2025. Reports for the first two quarters of this year have already reached 2,272.
To help businesses integrate AI more successfully, the BBB recommends considering how customers interact with new technology, offering an option to reach a human representative after a set amount of time, creating a clear escalation process for higher-level complaints, monitoring feedback on the company’s BBB profile, building on features customers praise, adjusting rollouts that aren’t working, and ensuring customers feel heard even when they’re upset.
The BBB also offered tips for consumers to avoid AI-enabled scams: be wary of unexpected calls from automated voices and insist on reaching a real person for anything important; be cautious of unknown numbers, since scammers can change numbers quickly; double-check links at the top of search results, since some scammers place ads impersonating real AI companies; and do research using resources like BBB.org/scamstudies to stay informed about AI-related fraud.
The full study is available through the BBB.
