[debaserab2]

> Significantly economically impactful in some cases- obvious examples of call centers and first-line customer support.

Is it that obvious?

Yesterday I had a trivial but uncommon issue with my pharmacy. I reached out to them online - their chatbot was the only channel available. I tried, over the course of 20 minutes and 3 restarted sessions, to communicate an issue that a human would have been able to respond to in 30 seconds. Eventually I just gave up and got the prescription filled elsewhere.

No doubt this pharmacy saved money by cutting support staff. I just think it's easy to see these solutions and cost savings without bothering to look at how much of a frustrating experience it can be for a customer.

[bombcar]

It is very easy to measure costs associated with a customer.

It is nearly impossible to measure the customers lost.

And you may never return, which they’ll never know.

[pixl97]

Unless all pharmacies go to automation, in which you're screwed.

And don't think it can't happen. Consolidation in to just a few companies us happening in huge numbers of industries.

[bombcar]

That’s the killer, and it gets bad really fast once an industry “decides” on something. And people simply fall through the cracks.

[tanseydavid]

Do you have any reason to believe that the Chatbot was GPT3.5 or GPT4 based?

[Waterluvian]

I’d be surprised if something like a pharmacy managed to adopt a tech that quickly. In my experience non-tech industries often take quite a while to adopt.

[martyvis]

I have seen plenty of chatbots used by my IT company and 3rd party suppliers I deal with. They really just turn what used to be phone tree to something text based. Pretty basic keyword search and recipes from my experience - that I usually like to escape to a human as soon as I can. I welcome a proper conversational AI chatbot that actually gets stuff done.

[hartator]

How are you gonna answer things like pricing? Issue with pharmacies is the super complicated and super secretive pricing structure. A good UI can solve this if they want to drop the secrecy.

[debaserab2]

I don't think so, I assume it's some more dated ML approach -- my point is moreso that it's not obvious that it's a good solution for this problem yet.

[yowzadave]

Seems unlikely they would be trusting a system that so willingly makes up stuff to provide a customer with life-critical advice about medications