The study investigated the impact of chatbot adoption on customer engagement and relationship building in the banking industry in Jordan. A structured questionnaire was distributed to 384 bank customers. The results revealed that chatbots can offer transactional efficiency at some level, but they cannot match the quality of human experience at the current time. The descriptive and multivariate analysis also established chatbots’ usefulness for simple queries but persistent deficits in emotional connections, satisfaction, and channel preference relative to human and phone-based banking. However, despite nascent youth adoption, the survey uncovers organizational and cultural challenges in sustaining digital transformation momentum. Overall, the findings contribute to a developing world perspective to balance the mainstream narrative on chatbots’ universality. They emphasize gradually easing chatbots into banks’ service ecosystem based on transparent purpose specifications and participatory customer input while augmenting staff skills for judgment-intensive services that preserve jobs.