August 03, 2026 • 5 min reading
By Indrabati Sarkar, Lead - Brand Voice & Content (Consultant)
According to Salesforce data, roughly 47% of field service appointments do not go completely as scheduled. So the very first challenge of the field service industry uncertainty with which your technician starts every service request.
A customer reports that their air conditioner has stopped working or a telecom line has gone down, or an internet router is not responding but the cause behind this remains undetermined. Therefore, the technicians are dispatched with limited information and often that means there is a chain of activity starting which may or may not result in resolution.
Technicians inspect the equipment, diagnose the issue, identify missing parts, call experts if needed, and often schedule a second visit. In the meantime, the customer is waiting while costs increase, productivity drops and dissatisfaction mounts. Research cited by Microsoft found that half of frontline employees report feeling burned out, while 66% say they don't have enough time to complete their tasks. Much of that time is lost searching for information, coordinating with different teams, and waiting for decisions.
However, with the rise of Agentic AI the field service industry is set to be revolutionised as it has the potential to impact every stage of the service cycle. About 70% high-performing field service organizations have invested in AI to optimize routing, reporting, task automation and technician utilisation.
The first challenge for a technician is not repairing equipment but understanding the underlying issue. With data like service history, equipment details, SOPs etc scattered across various systems, the technician is likely to waste more than 30% of their time looking for the right information.
Here, an Agentic AI shall read the request, create structured work orders, retrieve service history, identify recurring failures and equip the technician with the relevant information even before they leave for the job.
It is not necessary that the technician nearest to a service site shall be the best person for the job and that is why field service managers or dispatchers often end up spending 50-75% of their work week in just trying to get the right technician to the right place.
With Agentic AI evaluating skills, location, previous jobs, equipment history and inventory before recommending who should take the call, the assigned technician has a significantly higher chance of fixing it on the first visit. Saving time not only for the managers, but also saving the cost of revisits.
According to Zinier State of Field Service Management report, 85% of technicians feel the knowledge required to service products is changing. Modern equipment is becoming more and more sophisticated and with constant software updates, connected devices, newer product variants and changing service procedures technicians are now expected to remember more than ever before. 25% of technicians feel their companies didn’t make it easy for them to know what parts are needed for service visits or to find the necessary information needed to resolve service inquiries.
Agentic AI can turn information retrieval into a conversation and with digital work instructions, the technician does not have to navigate multiple systems. They can receive the relevant SOP, equipment history, diagnostics and step-by-step guidance for the asset standing in front of them within their field of view and with modern wearables work with their hands-free.
Even the most capable technicians at times need support in the field from time to time. Now, remote experts can see exactly what the technician sees through a mobile device or smart glasses. Agentic AI brings together equipment history, guided workflows and live collaboration, allowing experts to guide repairs without having to travel from one location to another. This also means that a specialist who could only support one site in a day, can now support several.
More than 70% field service technicians feel that they spend too much of their day-to-day time on paperwork and that is not an overstatement at all. A technicians job does not quite end with a repair being done right. Then comes the entire barrage of documentation. From service reports, inspection records, compliance forms to customer summaries and more, the necessary paperwork is overwhelming and time consuming.
Technicians can now generate work summaries, capture observations, update service records and organise knowledge automatically with the help of Agentic AI. Additionally, every completed job becomes part of the organisation's knowledge base which can be used as further training material.
The current customers are knowledgeable people with very little time in hand for redos. So they are not only expecting a fast resolution in the very first go, they also want informed response and better communication. A Servicemax report says that while 68% customers want faster resolutions, 42% want a better understanding of asset performance and asset condition.
To meet these expectations, companies do not need more technicians but need to help every technician have access to relevant information, faster remote collaboration and more time to actually solve the problem they were sent to fix.
According to the 2024 Field Service Emerging Technologies Report, 70% of field service organisations have invested in AI and machine learning, while 54% are already using augmented reality or wearable devices to support technicians.
Yet adoption remains a work in progress. The 2024 Field Service AI Report found that 58% of organisations have only partially integrated AI into their service operations, 37% are just beginning.
At UnfoldXR, we believe the next phase of field service will be shaped by how effectively AI becomes part of everyday work, helping technicians arrive better prepared, make faster decisions, and capture knowledge for the next service call.
Powered by AVA, our Agentic AI layer, UnfoldXR combines enterprise knowledge, guided workflows, remote expert assistance, and real-time decision support into a single frontline experience. To know more about how we are going to help service organisations achieve fewer repeat visits and faster resolutions, write to us at info@unfoldxr.com or visit us at www.unfoldxr.com.