Customer support AI addresses a fundamental scaling problem: support volume grows with the customer base, but hiring scales linearly while costs compound. AI intervenes at three points in the support lifecycle: deflection (handling contacts before they reach an agent), triage (routing contacts to the right resource), and augmentation (helping agents resolve contacts faster). Gartner estimates that 80% of customer interactions will be handled by AI by 2029, up from 20% in 2023. The shift from keyword-rule chatbots to LLM-powered assistants is the primary driver, large language models handle the long tail of queries that scripted systems cannot.