Anthropic Isn’t the Best at Powering Customer Service, New Data Show

Anthropic’s models may be unparalleled at coding, but they’re less capable of powering AI voice and chat applications for customer service than other AI providers. That’s according to data from NiCE, a customer service software provider whose clients include Toyota, Allianz, Nestle and Frontier Airlines.

Anthropic’s models have a relatively long “time to first token,” the time it takes them to begin generating a response after receiving a request, said Neeraj Verma, vice president of NiCE’s AI agent business. That’s a big problem with voice agents, particularly in customer service, where milliseconds matter. 

Verma said voice or text customer service bot can pause for about 2.5 seconds—at most—before it starts to look unnatural to the customer. (Verma estimates that the market for providing AI-powered customer experience software is worth $15 billion and quickly growing.)

If NiCE uses Anthropic’s models for its customer service, Verma said, “my bot's going to sound really crappy” because the models are “just too slow.”