[duskdozer]

I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call. Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

[HWR_14]

Or the decision maker put "replaced 50% of call workers with AI" on their resume and got a new job instead of measuring the results.

[palmotea]

> I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call.

That's an example of a weird heuristic I frequently see applied to corporations: assume some awful decision is the result of some scarily hyper-competent design process, and construct a speculative explanation along those lines.

But must of us have worked in corporations, an know how stupid and incompetent they can be.

> Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

Occam's razor points to this as the reason.