Which Industries Use AI Sales Agents? 2026 Data From Thousands of Businesses on CloseBot

We get asked all the time which industries are using AI sales agents. So we pulled the numbers. Across more than 12,000 currently active businesses running on CloseBot, healthcare is the biggest group at 23.0%. Fitness (14.1%), home services (13.7%) and real estate (10.2%) round out the top four, and together those four make up 61% of all businesses automating conversations on the CloseBot platform.

One quick note on how we counted. Every number in this report is a count of businesses. A single CloseBot account can run as many businesses as it wants, in as many niches as it wants, so one agency might have a dental office, a roofer and a mortgage broker all running side by side. Counting businesses gives you the clearest picture of where AI sales agents are actually talking to leads every day. These numbers do not represent the number of booked appointments or qualified leads per industry. We will have different reports coming out later this year with that information. Subscribe to our newsletter below to get updates like this emailed to you.

The short version

• Healthcare leads at 23.0%. Dental, med spa and chiropractic alone make up about 70% of the healthcare businesses on CloseBot.
• Businesses that sell by appointment adopt first. Every top industry needs a real conversation and a spot on the calendar before a customer pays.
• Real estate on CloseBot leans toward buying property. Investors and cash home buyers (53.1% combined) outnumber residential agents (39.0%).
• Home services is the most spread out. Roofing is the biggest trade, and it only holds 11.3% of the category.
• Half of insurance is life insurance. Add health and Medicare and you’ve got 84.3% of insurance businesses.
• Car washes outnumber car dealers. Car wash and detailing shops (49.0%) beat dealerships (31.7%) in automotive.

How we measured it

We looked at every business on CloseBot that has handled at least 100 recent messages with real leads, as of October 2026. That came to more than 12,000 businesses. We left out test accounts and anything inactive, so everyone in this data is using an AI sales agent with real customers right now.

We left out test accounts and anything inactive, so everyone in this data is using an AI sales agent with real customers right now.

• What we mean by a business. Inside CloseBot, each business is called a “source.” It’s one company with its own leads, calendars and agents. Agency clients, Done For You builds and businesses that signed up on their own all count the same way: one source per business.
• How we sort industries. Our classifier places each business into a three-level taxonomy. The first level is the primary industry (like Healthcare), the second is the specialty (like Dental) and the third gets more specific (like general versus cosmetic). There are 27 primary industries, and 98.5% of businesses fit cleanly into one. The other 1.5% show up as Unclassified.
• How we handle privacy. Classification happens automatically. Nobody at CloseBot reads conversations to build this report, and we only publish totals and percentages. You won’t find any individual business, lead or message in here, nor is HIPAA PII revealed to non-BAA signed providers.

Every percentage is a share of businesses within the category you’re looking at. We rounded to one decimal, so a few categories may add up to slightly more or less than 100%.

The full breakdown: businesses on CloseBot by industry

The top 12 industries cover 91.8% of businesses. After that, 15 smaller industries each sit at 1.2% or less.

The pattern: AI sales agents win where a sale needs a conversation and a calendar

If you go by national surveys, you’d expect tech and finance to lead the way. In the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, Information and Finance and Insurance businesses report the highest AI use rates, well above the national average. Another analysis of that same survey found that Sales and Marketing is the business function where companies use AI the most.

Our data answers a more specific question: which businesses trust AI to talk to their leads, qualify them and book them? The answer looks pretty different. The leaders are hands-on, local businesses that run on appointments. Dentists, gyms, roofers and real estate investors far outnumber software and media companies.

Which businesses trust AI to talk to their leads, qualify them and book them?

What ties them together is how they sell. Every industry in our top eight shares three things:

1. It’s a considered purchase. The service is expensive, personal or both, so people have questions before they commit, sometimes requireing long lengths of followup.
2. The sale starts with an appointment. A consult, a trial class, an estimate or a call comes first, and the money comes after.
3. Speed matters. Leads come in from ads and forms, and they cool off fast when nobody answers.

That’s exactly where an AI sales agent shines. It answers right away, handles the questions your front desk would, and gets the appointment on the books. It also explains why some categories you might expect to be big are small. Hair salons and barbershops mostly run on walk-ins and booking apps, so there just isn’t much conversation for an agent to handle.

We saw the same thing when we studied 1.1 million booked appointments. AI pays off most when a lead needs to be engaged, followed up with and turned into a time on the calendar.

How concentrated is each industry?

In seven of our top eight industries, the three biggest subcategories hold two-thirds or more of the businesses. Home services is the one that breaks the pattern.

If you run an agency, this tells you a lot about how to build. In a concentrated industry like real estate, one proven playbook can carry most of your clients. In home services, plan on building a separate agent for each trade.

1. Healthcare (23.0% of businesses)

Healthcare is our largest industry, and three specialties carry most of it. Dental (26.0%), med spa and aesthetics (22.3%) and chiropractic (21.2%) together account for about 70% of healthcare businesses on CloseBot.

What we’re seeing

• Elective and cash-pay care leads the way. Med spas, weight loss (4.0%), hormone and functional medicine (3.5%) and plastic surgery (0.8%) all sell through a consult that the patient pays for themselves. Primary care only makes up 1.3%.
• The front desk is where things get stuck. Dental and chiropractic offices get a constant stream of new patient questions, insurance questions and reschedules. An AI receptionist can answer all of those right away and book straight into the schedule, which frees the team up to focus on the patients in front of them.
• There’s a long tail of specialties. We see 25 different healthcare specialties in the data, from physical therapy (3.9%) to hearing and audiology (0.4%). An agency can serve every one of them from a single CloseBot account.

HIPAA: what healthcare businesses should know

Healthcare conversations often include protected health information. According to HHS guidance on HIPAA and cloud computing, any vendor that creates, receives, stores or transmits electronic protected health information for a practice counts as a business associate, and that means it needs a signed business associate agreement (BAA).

HIPAA support comes with CloseBot’s Growth Plan. We sign BAAs with our customers, and we have signed BAAs in place with every provider in our stack, including our LLM and infrastructure providers. That full chain matters, because an AI chatbot is only as compliant as the least compliant vendor behind it.

HIPAA support comes with CloseBot’s Growth Plan – signed BAAs with our users and BAAs signed with all of our providers, including LLMs and infrastructure providers.

If you’re shopping for a HIPAA compliant chatbot, ask these three questions first:

1. Will the vendor sign a BAA with your practice?
2. Do the AI model and hosting providers behind it have BAAs in place too?
3. Does the plan you’re actually paying for include HIPAA?

Note: If you’re on a CloseBot plan other than a Growth Plan, your CloseBot account is not covered by HIPAA. Speak with our team about Growth Plans today.

Read more: AI for healthcare practices · CloseBot HIPAA articles · Compare plans

2. Fitness & Recreation (14.1%)

Gyms and health clubs (30.4%) are the biggest group in fitness. The surprise is martial arts at 25.7%. Martial arts schools come in right behind gyms, even though there are far fewer of them out in the world.

What we’re seeing

• Trial classes and AI go together. Martial arts, boutique studios (12.8%) and CrossFit (6.1%) all sell with a free or low-cost first class. The agent’s job is simple and repeatable: answer questions, sort out the schedule and book that first visit.
• Parents are often the ones asking. A lot of martial arts and youth sports (1.4%) leads are parents checking on age groups, class times and pricing in the evening, after the front desk has gone home. CloseBot is able to book accurately to multiple different calendars, an important trait for class-related services.
• Personal training makes the top three (18.5%). Trainers usually start with a consult, which is a perfect fit for an appointment-setting agent.

Plenty of fitness businesses also serve multilingual communities. Here’s how one gym owner runs his CloseBot agent in Spanish.

3. Home Services (13.7%)

Home services is the most spread out industry we track. Roofing is the biggest trade, and even it only holds 11.3% of the category. No single trade comes close to running the show.

What we’re seeing

• Roofing, HVAC, kitchen and bath remodeling, and pest control lead the pack. Together they make up 37.9% of home services. The other 62% is split across more than 20 trades, from paving to pools to solar.
• Each trade needs its own agent. A roofing agent has to qualify storm damage and insurance claims. A pest control agent books recurring service. An HVAC agent needs to triage emergencies. If you serve home services clients, build for each trade.
• Leads come in waves. Storms, heat waves and spring remodeling season all bring bursts of inbound leads that no human team can answer within minutes. An AI agent handles the spike instantly and keeps following up on its own.

Read more: AI for home services · How AI is transforming home services, from plumbing to roofing

4. Real Estate (10.2%)

Most real estate businesses on CloseBot are on the buying side. Real estate investors (33.5%) and cash home buyers (19.6%) together make up 53.1% of the category, ahead of residential brokerages and agents at 39.0%.

What we’re seeing

• Seller leads take patience. Investors and cash buyers market to homeowners who might not be ready to sell for months. An AI agent keeps those conversations going without wearing out the acquisitions team. In our booking benchmark research, one lead booked about 355 days after the first message.
• Agents use AI to get to leads first. Residential agents buy leads from portals and ads, and those leads expect a reply within minutes. The agent responds, checks timeline and budget, and books a showing or a call.
• Three subcategories make up 92.1% of the industry. Real estate is the most concentrated of our top eight, so a playbook that works for one business usually works for the next.

Got an old list of sellers who went quiet? That’s a great place to start with AI database reactivation.

Read more: AI for real estate

5. Insurance (6.3%)

Half of the insurance businesses on CloseBot sell life insurance (50.6%). Add health insurance (19.8%) and Medicare (13.9%), and personal coverage accounts for 84.3% of the category.

What we’re seeing

• Insurance is sold on a call. Life, health and Medicare policies usually close on a call with a licensed agent. The AI agent replies to the lead, checks basic eligibility and books that call.
• Lots of leads, and lots of competition for them. Many agents buy leads that get sold to other agents too, so whoever responds first often wins. That’s right in the wheelhouse of instant AI follow-up.
• Property and commercial lines are small. Auto (2.0%), homeowners (0.9%) and commercial (2.7%) are mostly quote-driven, and a lot of that runs through online rating tools.

This lines up with the national picture too. Census survey results put Finance and Insurance among the sectors with the highest AI use.

Read more: Insurance agent AI that qualifies, supports and books

6. Automotive (4.3%)

Car wash and detailing businesses (49.0%) outnumber car dealerships (31.7%) in automotive. Most of the AI agents in this category are working for service businesses that keep cars looking good.

What we’re seeing

• Detailing and ceramic coating run on quotes and bookings. Customers ask about vehicle size, packages and price, then pick a time. An agent can handle that whole conversation start to finish.
• Memberships drive car wash adoption. Monthly wash plans reward fast follow-up on every inquiry, plus outreach to members who have lapsed.
• Dealerships use AI on internet leads. For the 31.7% that are dealers, the agent answers inventory questions and books test drives and trade-in appraisals.
• Window tint and wraps (5.8%) round out the top three. Like detailing, these are appearance services that sell through a quote and an appointment.

If you work with auto clients, you can run detailers, dealers and body shops from one CloseBot account, each with its own agent.

7. Personal Care & Beauty (4.2%)

Tattoo and piercing studios are the biggest group in personal care (33.7%), followed by lashes and brows (17.7%) and spas and massage (15.2%). Hair salons, barbershops and nail salons add up to just 3.2%.

What we’re seeing

• Services that start with a consult and a deposit lead. Tattoos, permanent makeup (11.5%) and lash extensions are custom, higher-ticket work. Clients ask questions, share ideas and put down a deposit before they book.
• Walk-in and app-booked businesses are a smaller slice. Most hair and nail appointments get booked in a scheduling app without much back and forth, so there’s less for an AI sales agent to do.
• Inquiries show up after hours. Beauty leads often come in through Instagram and Facebook DMs in the evening. An AI agent replies right there in the same channel while the artist is busy with a client.

For agencies, the takeaway is to go after the beauty niches where a real conversation happens before the sale.

8. Financial Services (4.0%)

Mortgage lending is almost half of financial services on CloseBot (45.5%). Commercial and business lending (15.9%) and financial planning and wealth management (13.3%) come next.

What we’re seeing

• Lending is all about pre-qualification. Mortgage and business lending leads want quick answers on rates, timelines and paperwork before they talk to a loan officer. The AI agent handles that first contact and books the call with a qualified borrower.
• Advisors book discovery calls. Wealth managers, tax resolution firms (3.5%) and credit repair (5.7%) all sell through a free consultation, the same appointment-first pattern we see across the top eight.
• Lending makes up 64.1% of the category. Mortgage, commercial and consumer lending lead the way, while back-office services like payroll and collections are under 1% combined.

If you’re in a regulated financial business, set your agent up to qualify and schedule, and let your licensed team handle advice and rate quotes.

19 more industries

Outside the top eight, another 19 industries make up about 18.7% of businesses on CloseBot. A few of them are worth keeping an eye on.

• Coaching and consulting programs (3.9%) sell high-ticket programs through a discovery call. That’s the appointment-first pattern in its purest form.
• Hospitality, travel and events (3.0%) includes venues, planners and tour operators booking consults and site visits.
• Marketing and advertising (2.9%) is mostly agencies running AI agents for their own pipeline, on top of the agents they build for clients.
• Professional and business services (2.2%) and legal (0.7%) use agents for intake. The agent qualifies the matter and books a consult.
• Retail, education, food and beverage, and construction each land between 0.7% and 1.2%.
• Technology, manufacturing, logistics, agriculture and security are each 0.2% or less. These tend to be longer B2B sales cycles with fewer inbound consumer leads.

Since one CloseBot account runs unlimited businesses, you can test a new niche without new software, new logins or a new contract.

How aggregate data makes every CloseBot agent better

CloseBot handles approximately 150,000 messages a day across all of these industries. That volume is our biggest advantage, and every customer gets the benefit of it.

We study aggregate, anonymized trends across the whole platform. The questions we’re answering look like this:

• Which agent and tool setups book appointments most accurately?
• Which follow-up cadences convert, and how long should an agent keep following up?
• Which channels, days and times lead to booked appointments?
• Which AI model makes the best default for sales conversations?

What we learn turns into better defaults for everyone. Our research on 1.1 million booked appointments, for example, shaped the defaults we ship with every new agent, including the default AI model.

Using a Conversational AI focused platform means you’re using the best of the best… updates we implement mean revenue goes up with 0 effort for you and your clients. All-in-one solutions lack the focus to carry out these kinds of updates.

So when a dental office in Ohio launches an agent on CloseBot, it starts with what we’ve learned across thousands of businesses, and its own conversations stay private. You can track the same kinds of signals for your own businesses with CloseBot Analytics.

How to cite this data

Journalists, researchers and agencies are welcome to use these numbers and charts. We just ask that you credit CloseBot and link back to this page.

Suggested citation: CloseBot, “Which Industries Use AI Sales Agents? 2026 Data From Thousands of Businesses on CloseBot,” October 2026, closebot.com.

For more original research, see the CloseBot research library.

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Sources

• CloseBot platform data, 12,000+ businesses with at least 100 recent messages with real leads, October 2026
• CloseBot: AI booking bot benchmarks from 1.1 million appointments
• U.S. Census Bureau: AI use among businesses, Business Trends and Outlook Survey (May 2026)
• WeWork: The new AI divide, analysis of Census BTOS data
• HHS: Guidance on HIPAA and cloud computing