[victor106]

> cutting out menial decisions such as customer service

This is cited so often. We tried it at a large scale with some of the best engineering talent but unfortunately the humans on the other side preferred speaking to and interacting with a human by a wide margin.

We are still trying with the latest AI models but humans are still doing better at serving other humans.

In one of our studies, we observed by a large margin that our customers would hang up immediately on knowing that they are interacting with an AI system.

I have heard this from others as well.

[dbspin]

Isn't it obvious why?

We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.

[da_chicken]

Yeah, it's like trying to use an ORM to find data in the database that's invalid due to a bug. You can't see things in the system that break the premises of the system by using the system, and the fact that some things are "supposed to be impossible" doesn't change the reality of what's actually occurring in the data store.

So customer support needs to know how the systems works and need to understand what the data means, but also has to know when the system is factually incorrect. Customer support has to know when the second party is speaking the truth.

[ej88]

This is exactly why customer service is ripe to be decimated by AI agents that can actually interact with systems

[linkregister]

Do you know that to be true or are you speculating?

As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems.

We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!" into the phone because their website and phone trees only handle the happy path.

[victor106]

We tried them as well and they did worse than a foundational LLM model which is saying something.

[NetMageSCW]

As someone who has an automated drive-thru Bojangle’s nearby, I would say the AI is always immediately available, understands better, feels out the conforming order screen in real time, and generally results in my order being placed correctly.