Aquant’s 2026 Field Service Benchmark: Companies Can Unlock up to 26% in Service Cost Savings by Scaling Knowledge Across the Workforce

Aquant finds that failed visits, remote resolution potential, and closing the skills gap represent the largest opportunities for cost savings. Companies that connect their systems and service data into a unified intelligence layer consistently outperform those operating in silos.

NEW YORK, Feb. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Aquant today released The 2026 Field Service KPI Benchmark Report, an industry-wide analysis of anonymized performance data from 161 service organizations. The report spans nearly 30 million service events, 7 million assets, and $8.3 billion in service costs collected over three years.

The findings reveal a widening gap between asset-centric organizations powered by a unified intelligence layer and those still operating in data silos. According to Aquant’s analysis, the performance divide between top field service teams and those in the bottom 20% remains substantial, highlighting greater opportunities for service cost savings than ever before.

Top performers resolve issues faster, require fewer visits, and operate at significantly lower cost. In contrast, bottom performers remain trapped in cycles of repeat work, where failed visits, avoidable dispatches, and extended resolution times drive higher costs and diminish customer satisfaction.

“Field service leaders aren’t winning by adding another point solution. They’re winning by unifying the tools and data they already have into one intelligence layer,” said Assaf Melochna, CEO and Co-founder of Aquant. “This year’s benchmark makes the path forward clear: when service context converges into a single source of truth, AI can move from assisting inside one workflow to driving operational outcomes end-to-end, scaling top-performing results beyond a handful of star technicians.”

Key Findings

1) The performance gap is massive

• First-Time-Fix (FTF): The industry benchmark for FTF is 77%, but top-performing companies reach 88%, while bottom performers lag at 60%—a 28-percentage point gap in “fixed right the first time.”
  
• Speed to Resolution (MTTR): The industry benchmark for MTTR is 4.5 days, but top performers close cases in 2.5 days, while bottom performers stretch to 10 days.

2) Failed visits are the biggest fixable cost problem

• Failed visits account for 25% of total service cost at the median. For bottom performers, failed visits consume nearly half (44%) of total service cost—versus 14% for top performers.
  
• When cases require multiple visits, top teams are resolving multi-visit issues in under two weeks, while bottom performers see those same cases stretch toward a month, amplifying customer frustration and internal cost.

3) Many field trips didn’t need to happen

• Remote resolution potential: 1 in 5 cases could be resolved remotely, yet many teams still roll a truck—turning what could be a 1.4% cost impact into 18.3%.
  

4) The upside is double-digit savings—up to 26%

• Aquant modeled the cost impact if more teams performed like top performers more often. The result: double-digit service cost reductions, typically in the low teens, with potential savings up to 26% in some segments, an increase from 23% last year.
  

Workforce Retention and Skill Equity Win in Service

Top performance tracks closely with workforce stability: top companies retain 87% of employees vs 66% for underperforming companies. That churn doesn’t just create hiring strain; it increases burnout, erodes morale, and drives operational inconsistency as knowledge walks out the door.

The report also measures the “skills gap” as the difference in first-time fix (FTF) rates between top technicians and everyone else: the gap is small (only 2.9 percentage points) for best-in-class teams, and 10 points for underperforming teams, where critical knowledge remains concentrated among a few technicians.

Bottom line: service excellence can’t scale if expertise lives in a few heads. Leaders make knowledge portable so more technicians perform like top technicians, more often.

2026 Marks The Shift From Assistive AI to Operational AI

The report concludes that 2026 is the year service organizations shift from assistive AI point solutions to operational AI, where specialized agents work from a shared intelligence layer across the entire organization. Rather than optimizing one step in isolation, an agentic approach enables end-to-end execution: better troubleshooting, fewer failed visits, stronger knowledge capture, improved PM effectiveness, and continuous feedback into training, planning, and customer experience.

About Aquant

Aquant is an Agentic AI platform for equipment manufacturers and other asset-centric organizations. It connects data and context across an organization’s existing systems into a shared intelligence layer, so teams can access knowledge through the channels they already work in—web, mobile, voice/phone, offline, or via API. Aquant empowers service teams—and other departments—to build and deploy AI agents that deliver consistent, context-aware guidance across workflows. By combining documented sources such as manuals and service history with tribal knowledge, Aquant turns organizational know-how into actionable intelligenceAquant helps companies access institutional knowledge seamlessly, troubleshoot equipment issues faster, train smarter, reduce costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

Media Contact

Micaela McPadden
Micaela.mcpadden@aquant.ai

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