Do Customers Actually Want AI?

So what does the evidence suggest? 

The most honest starting point is acknowledging that consumer enthusiasm for AI in customer service is mixed, and in the UK, arguably more sceptical than elsewhere.

A 2025 ServiceNow survey of 17,000 EMEA consumers found that UK customers are the best in the region at spotting when they're talking to an AI and 69% describe AI chatbots as efficient but emotionless, often missing tone, urgency, or frustration. 

55% of UK consumers believe AI will eventually close the gap between machine and human interaction and those aren't figures to dismiss especially when block management is not a low-stakes, low-emotion service category. Leaseholders contact their managing agent about their home; the boiler that's failed on a Friday night, the leak that's damaging their ceiling or the front door not being secure. These are not interactions where "efficient but emotionless" cuts it and yet the same research makes clear that customers do want AI. They just want it in the right place.

Across sectors, a picture is emerging that's more nuanced than either AI sceptics or AI evangelists tend to admit.

A 2025 multi-market survey by Attest found that 31% of UK consumers now believe AI can provide a better customer experience up four percentage points on the year before. Trust in AI-provided information has risen to 43%, up from 40% in 2024. These are meaningful shifts in a short period.

Perhaps more telling: 69% of consumers say they prefer AI-powered self-service tools for quick issue resolution. What they're not saying is that they want AI for every interaction they want it for the right ones. Speed and convenience for low-stakes queries. Human empathy and judgment for the complex and emotional.

This is the distinction that matters most for block management. A leaseholder who wants to know whether their service charge payment has been received, or check the status of a maintenance ticket, or find out when their building's last fire risk assessment was that person wants an answer, and they want it now. They do not necessarily need to speak to a person to get it. That is precisely where AI earns its keep.

It would be easy to treat block management as uniquely resistant to AI adoption. But looking across other service industries, the same pattern repeats: initial scepticism, followed by rapid normalisation once customers experience the practical benefits.

Banking is the clearest case study. In the UK, 87% of adults now use online banking and 40% have accounts with digital-only banks. Adoption that has been driven and sustained by AI-enhanced self-service. HSBC's virtual assistant Amy handles routine banking queries resolving around 80% of issues without human involvement and cutting wait times by 40%. Customers who were initially wary of digital banking now can't imagine queuing at a branch to check a balance. In retail there is a similar arc. AI-powered chatbots handled significant volumes during the 2024 peak retail season, with retailers using them reporting a 15% uplift in conversion rates. ASOS uses AI to manage order tracking, returns, and product recommendations functions that customers have adopted not because they were pushed to, but because it genuinely made their experience easier. Telecoms leads all sectors on AI adoption in customer service at 95% a sign of the sheer volume of repetitive queries and the 24/7 nature of customer need. The pattern holds: customers who once demanded a human for every query now routinely resolve billing queries, technical faults, and account changes through automated channels.

What these sectors have in common is not that they forced AI on their customers. They identified the interactions where AI genuinely outperforms human service speed, availability, and consistency and deployed it there. The human resource was preserved, and in many cases elevated, for the interactions where it matters most.

So what does this mean for block management? 

The residential leasehold sector has historically been slow to modernise. Managing agents have operated on legacy systems, email chains, and spreadsheets long after comparable industries moved on. That is changing and changing quickly.

New platforms purpose-built for block management are emerging, designed to give leaseholders and RTM directors direct access to issue reporting, service charge information, maintenance tracking, and communications through a single portal. The best of these integrate AI to automate responses to routine queries and surface the right information at the right moment. The evidence from firms already using them is that leaseholder contact volumes for straightforward queries fall substantially  freeing property managers to spend more time on the interactions that actually require professional judgment.

This is not a theoretical future. It is happening now, and the firms that are not investing in these capabilities are already beginning to feel the competitive pressure from those that are.

There is, of course, a right way and a wrong way to do this. The wrong way is to deploy AI as a cost-cutting exercise that puts a chatbot in front of every customer interaction regardless of what they need. Customers notice and resent it especially in a sector already challenged on trust. For example we released the customer facing version of our AI assistant but usage is purely voluntary (callers are given the option to use it on any incoming call) and we have seen adoption increase as people experience it by their choice.

The right way is to be honest about what AI is. Where it is being used, what it's for and to use the efficiency gains to raise the quality of human service where it matters, not to reduce headcount and hope no one notices.

Colin Stokes, Managing Director, Adiuvo