Customer service: AI is accepted if a human stays reachable
45% of French people accept AI in customer service for simple requests, or as long as they can still reach an adviser; 41.5% always prefer a person. The figures come from the Xpulse 2026 study by Les Archétypes (Syneido group), based on 1,000 respondents and reported by Relation Client Magazine on 1 October 2026.
The gap widens with age: conditional acceptance reaches 57% among 18-34s and 50% among 35-54s, then drops to 34% among those aged 55 and over, where 51% reject automation and want a human in every case. Social category matters too: 54% of managers and senior professionals accept the algorithm with safeguards, against 38% of people not in work. Nathalie Lecuyer, managing director of Les Archétypes, sums it up: once a request becomes “more complex or more binding”, being able to get back to a human easily “remains an important source of reassurance”.
At a domiciliation agency (a provider of registered business addresses in France), requests range from “has my mail arrived?” to terminating a contract, and the same split applies as it stands. An assistant can answer the simple, repetitive questions (opening hours, documents to provide, domiciliation certificate, mail forwarding) with information the agency has approved. As soon as a request commits the client (contract, incomplete file, complaint), it hands over to a person at the agency, who sees the conversation and picks it up. The front desk and the phone stay open for anyone who would rather talk to someone from the start.
For AppH
- The study puts numbers on the rule our front-desk assistant is built on: it handles the simple and the repetitive, and a person at the agency stays reachable at every step. It is not an option you have to switch on.
- The age split gives a concrete setting: offer the assistant (QR code in the agency, chat on the website) without ever forcing it, so that clients who want a human, more than one in two over 55, find one at the front desk without a detour.
Against / the honest limit
- For 41.5% of respondents, an assistant adds nothing: they would rather wait for a person. A network counting on AI to cut back its front desk would lose some of its clients; we advise against it.
- The study covers consumers' relations with brands, not the business clients of a domiciliation agency, and the article publishes neither the fieldwork dates nor the questionnaire.
The most useful line in the study is Nathalie Lecuyer's: the question is not only where to deploy AI, “but how far, and for which audiences”. Our answer for a domiciliation agency: as far as the questions whose answers the agency has already written and approved, and for the clients who choose to use it. Beyond that, a person on your team answers, and the assistant says so plainly instead of improvising.
Reviewed by a human at AppH