2025 was a year of disruption for the support industry. Both B2C and B2B teams were hit with budget shakeups and a desire from executives to reduce workforce spend in favour of AI, while being expected to show up as credible business partners and deliver more personalised support. It was a big year.
Frontline realities shifted significantly
Frontline teams have been asked to deliver more with less and become increasingly agile, as external technology and market shifts shape our roadmaps. AI has become a non-negotiable, driving budget and headcount reductions, which in turn is forcing increased outsourcing and shifting hiring into lower-cost regions.
For individual contributors, this is adding cognitive load, and pushing them to balance customer experience and speed.
For many frontliners, the formal progression path hasn’t changed much in a decade - but the expectations inside each level have expanded. This is showing up in larger organisations with a growing use of matrix type structures to offer lateral moves (e.g. coaching, incident management, operations, and QA), however, leaders are often pushed to find role expansion opportunities in these areas for strong performers without title or hierarchy changes.
Culturally, our frontliners have kept pace with shifts over the past decade, continuing to seek autonomy, meaningful work, and the ability to make real impact within organisations. This has shown an ongoing need for psychologically safe and emotionally fluent environments. The smaller our tribes become, the closer and more supported team members need to feel.
A final observation in this space is the ongoing tension between build vs buy thinking for operations and tooling. As our teams become leaner, our team members have less time to build tooling that fits unique use-cases and are increasingly looking for ready-made toolsets that help them work faster and deliver better and more personalised outcomes with less effort.
Technology adoption shifted from platforms to pinpoint solutions
Platforms
In 2025, we saw an ongoing consolidation of platforms within teams and organisations, with the SaaS landscape remaining relatively unchanged. The year saw many teams standardising rather than switching. But adoption around these platforms accelerated on certain point solutions: especially in AI, QA and workflow automation. Many organisations are going to be playing catch-up heading into 2026.
Procurement efforts continued to primarily trust the key players, however, it’s likely we’ll see newcomers build presence throughout 2026 as AI further disrupts the landscape. Marketing and product teams applied a heavy focus on chat and conversational support, limiting market adoption of newer solutions, especially for entry-level teams and organisations who are operating with legacy channels.
Personalisation and collaboration tooling continues to be a high-priority consideration for leaders, especially in complex technical environments that require nuanced and contextually aware delivery. Teams need more implementation help and guidance than vendors typically provide. As dedicated admins and ops roles are cut, tool decisions land on the shoulders of leaders without platform expertise or time to develop it. This leads to increasingly inconsistent setups, duplicated work and avoidable mistakes.
Operations
As teams became leaner, Support was well positoned to adopt post-sales operational load, and began absorbing broader operations workflows even including RevOps. There was a slow march of early adopters doing this in mid-to-large teams, often those with dedicated operations roles.
Through the wider adoption of AI, teams are seeing an increase in intelligent workflow orchestration, with further growth in incident tooling and automated triage. Both n8n and Zapier remain strong contenders in the tooling space to facilitate operations, alongside native connections between platforms.
Quality Assurance
For QA, teams were pushing beyond the scorecard to more qualitative and outcome-based evaluation models. This keeps pace with broader shifts as we see support repositioned as operational nerve center with greater relationship ownership.
On a tooling front, following the Klaus acquisition in 2024, there remains an opportunity for a entry-to-mid-market operator to fill the niche space for leaner support and operations teams
Artificial Intelligence
AI was inescapable for most in 2025. Leaders and teams experimented extensively to understand what was achievable when buying out-of-the-box solutions compared to building in-house. The consensus appears that each has their place, however, build (not buy) is preferred for spaces where operational or technical nuance is deeply embedded into workflows. Buy has shown to be an easier solution for well-documented and well-understood needs.
Support teams became relationship owners
A broad shift moved support teams from relationship-influencing to relationship-owning. This is an outcome of leaner organisations and low-to-mid-maturity teams combining post-sales functions, driving teams to balance support and relationship needs. Enabled by always-on chat, shared Slack spaces, and AI - all of which makes this feel operationally feasible - it often traps smaller teams in firefighting mode, preventing them from realising richer outcomes and improvements sooner.
This shift is also contributing to the increased bifurcation of support models between large scale, high-volume low-complexity teams (e.g. Zappos) and the opposite (e.g. Snowplow). This is fuelled further by executives on the ‘outside’ who are influenced by broad industry narratives (or their own experiences) that might diverge from what teams specifically deliver.
While relationship ownership is a welcome breath of fresh air, letting Support be seen as more of a strategic pillar, this change requires careful balancing to ensure teams have adequate space and time to effectively understand and maintain all moving parts.
Modern leadership became increasingly relevant
The slow march from legacy management to modern leadership accelerated in 2025, fed by high levels of industry disruption, increasing executive expectations, and organisations seeking competitive edge. Guiding team members into the new era sees technical and emotional literacy skills becoming central for ongoing success.
Leaner team hierarchies are also slowing vertical career progression outside of specialist tracks, with a higher focus on player-coach models and reduction in pure leadership roles.
So what did "modern leadership" actually mean in 2025? Far greater accountability for how the work really gets done. This was the year we saw development of the "hands-on" leader, and the "strategic operator".
Systems thinking is emerging as a core skill for operational leaders within hyper-growth and scaled organisations. Executive teams are increasingly looking for leaders who can bring clarity and boost efficiency through AI and automation, while maintaining strong support foundations. Incident management is another callout here, where - partly as the result of more complex stacks, more dependencies, inexperienced implementors, and a heap of just-in-time builds - operational resilience takes a hit. Experience leading people through complex and emotionally charged environments, while maintaining trust, is a key strength for leaders going into 2026.
Finally, with a growing number of employees seeking progression but suffering what increasingly seems to be a functional holding pattern, leaders are pushed to focus in different ways on pathway and progression planning. Radford (and similar) frameworks are being commonly leveraged, but in a flatter org, they're frequently adapted or even thrown out. Leaders are lurching between formal frameworks and less well-defined lateral growth and cross-functional exposure - both for themselves and for their teams.
Customers expected greater connectivity
No industry wrap-up would be complete without a mention of why we’re all here: our customers. Last year we doubled down on efforts to deliver consistent and connected customer experiences across our teams and channels.
While the customer journey is swiftly becoming a shared experience, we’re still seeing disconnection across channels, and when issues are raised to partner teams. Leaders are tackling this with new pushes to unify the channel experience, and greater cross-functional collaboration to align strategy and operating rhythms. Customers want to be more involved, and they increasingly see support teams as troubleshooting partners. Support orgs are responding by building technical 'bridges' for paired troubleshooting, and by offering greater transparency to help customers understand what’s happening behind the scenes.
AI has raised customer expectations higher in areas of response quality, with generic or badly formed replies no longer seen as forgivable. This is also contributing to a greater desire from customers for personalisation and consistency regardless of what team or team member they’re engaging with.
Wrapping up
Was 2025 really so different to any other year in Support? Teams were expected to do more, with less. Expectations for quality, contextual awareness, and efficiency continued to rise.
But the margin for error is thinner than ever. The good news is we are also more enabled than ever to solve it, and to solve it for ourselves.
In 2026, the gap between organisations that invest wisely and judiciously in operational clarity, and those that rely on individual (and expensive) heroics, will be impossible to ignore.