[JohnMakin]

I am certainly not an expert but I agree a lot with your sentiment about the hubris - but the problem as presented in the article makes no sense to me.

If you see a value need for a receptionist, and you suspect that it is costing you thousands of dollars, wouldn't a normal response be, "I should think about hiring someone," rather than turning to an unproven, untested solution like this and leaving your business at the hands of how correct it is? I just cannot understand this line of thinking at all, reaching for a tool that would probably do a worse job than a human would do. Is it not wanting to hire? Not wanting to manage? Hype cycle? Where does this urge come from?

[nmstoker]

To take this further, if the focus really is the "luxury" part of the market, how do they expect this sort of response to go down well with customers?!

If someone is interested in paying luxury size fees, do they really want some cobbled together chatbot? I say this as an advocate for (high quality) chatbots for various practical needs, but it just seems like it is misunderstanding the customers (or maybe luxury is a bit of a loose term new in the area this mechanic works in?)

[Fomite]

Using AI tells me you don't care about the quality of your service.

[nmstoker]

Or maybe customer appetite can be markedly different depending on context.

[massysett]

These customers own expensive cars - or at least, cars that were expensive when they were new. The car might now be ten years old or more, and the owner bought it used. They want a prestige marque, but the customer does not have the money to buy a new prestige car. So they are looking to save on service.

All the time I see cars with expensive names - BMW, Mercedes Benz - broken down on the side of the road, while old Hondas and Toyotas keep cruising by. Those are the customers for this shop: they spent all their money buying an expensive used car, and now they can't afford to maintain it and fix looming problems; meanwhile the Toyota or Hyundai driver gets maintenance and maybe even takes it to the dealer for it.

A mechanic like this can't afford to hire someone to answer the phone. Such a person is expensive, and these customers want rock-bottom prices despite the car being expensive. So a chatbot is good enough and better than nothing.

[ninalanyon]

The most trustworthy mechanic I used in England had an appointment book pretty much full for four months in advance. He didn't answer the phone, didn't have a computer, just a desk diary. If you wanted him to work on your car you turned up at his workshop and spoke to him. If you were willing to wait until he'd finished whatever thing he was doing he'd take a quick look at your car and suggest a course of action. And despite his full order book if something looked urgent enough and small enough he'd fit you in quite quickly.

He charged reasonable prices, but definitely not rock bottom. He had no need to compete with the bottom feeders because every customer acted as his public relations agent.

How would a chatbot help?

[heavyset_go]

> Where does this urge come from?

Business owners tend to resent having to rely on and pay their workers.

Many of them believe people should line up and volunteer/be forced to work at their companies for free, the fact that they have to pay them is an insult.

They need workers, but workers are not worthy of being needed by them, or paid, so they look for any out at all.

[camillomiller]

The word you’re looking for is greed. These systems are greed enablers. The narrative used to pump them plays on greed. And so on.

Hiring a person for the job is 3000$ per month? Great let’s try to do this with 500$ and a tangle of vibecoded toothpick bridges! For a luxury service with generous margins this is a failure-prone mentality.

[heavyset_go]

They'd still try to replace workers, even if their attempted route of automation cost them more than hiring employees would, because of their resentment towards them

[kolinko]

Aside from a cost? It's also managing the actual human being, and making sure they have enough work. If the place has 5-10 calls a day, then it's pointless to hire receptionist that will do nothing for 1 hour, and then get 2 minutes chat. It used to be pointless to build software to do that, but since claude code it's cheap enough to make sense.

[skeeter2020]

receptionist as a service has been a thing for like... forever. You are never going to solve the problem of accurately estimating and quoting with AI or an answering service, so pay for someone to answer the phone and take down the details; have a mechanic or trained service rep review and estimate. Cheap code that doesn't solve the problem is not cheap.

[eucyclos]

Couldn't an ai take down the details and pass it to a mechanic or trained service rep?

[ssl-3]

Yes, of course. The bot can request information and the customer can provide it if they feel like it, and then someone qualified can call them back when they have their hands free.

But there's no bot, per se, needed at all. An answering machine from 1993 can do this same information-gathering job. :)

[camillomiller]

I can see a useful simple case of structuring a good answering system and then using AI to do STT then using Claude to structure the callback data

[ssl-3]

Good point.

So update the device from 1993's new-fangled digital answering machine to 2009's Google Voice, and have it do the transcription from voicemail to text.

Someone will still have to call Bill back about his Honda (which is actually the Kia he bought for his daughter -- Bill is not a very technical guy these days[1] and he confuses such concepts regularly) in order to get any trading of money for services done.

It doesn't take an LLM to get there, and Bill would probably prefer to avoid being frustrated by the bot's insistent nature.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356166

[deanputney]

If someone put on their website and voicemail that they were available for calls only from 8-10am (for example), or that they would return my call at that time, I'd make a point to call them then. It's reasonable that people are busy too.

[kcexn]

Isn't this the fundamental problem of all AI chatbots? If the problem is costing thousands of dollars (a week?), why not hire a person?

If it's not costing thousands of dollars, why would I hire a software engineer to build this for me.

[lovich]

Because the capital owning class in America commonly has an aversion to labor.

Labor is other humans and all their social hierarchy monkey brain bullshit activates in a way that a machine doesn’t. That’s why you’ll see companies spending equivalent or even slightly more money for a tool to do a job over a human being.

[eru]

The US ain't special. And in fact they are more likely to use more labour.

Have a look at US Walmart vs German Aldi for how that looks like.

[nextaccountic]

Walmart employs this amount of workers only because it is subsided by food stamps and other government assistance. The minute they were forced to actually pay for the labor they employ would fire a lot of people

https://old.reddit.com/r/IsItBullshit/comments/1eftcuc/isitb...

Actually a lot of US companies rely on this

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/04/workers-med...

[eru]

You are suggesting that if the government gives you a tax break, your boss would lower your salary? Why does your boss wait for the tax break or handout and doesn't just lower your salary now?

Also what's your counterfactual here? If Walmart fired their employees tomorrow and replaced them with robots, those ex-employees would magically no longer need food stamps nor government assistance? (Or more realistically: Walmart could pivot to the Aldi model of labour and replace many low intensity jobs with fewer higher intensity jobs. For the affected workers, the outcome is the same.)

If those ex-workers don't magically get off government assistance, if Walmart is out of the picture, in what sense is Walmart to blame for their poverty?

Conversely: if Walmart laying off these workers would magically improve their welfare, why do these workers wait for Walmart to lay them off?

[fn-mote]

> Walmart could pivot to the Aldi model of labour and replace many low intensity jobs with fewer higher intensity jobs.

Yes, this is the expected change.

> For the affected workers, the outcome is the same.

No? There are two classes of affected workers:

1. Workers who have been converted to full-time with benefits. These workers benefit from the change.

2. Workers who lose their jobs. These workers are worse off.

Your argument ignores class 1.

I don't think we'll get anywhere debating the relative merits of the tradeoff of those two groups, but I personally prefer the existence of class 1. At least with that class there are some winners.

[Jensson]

> Walmart employs this amount of workers only because it is subsided by food stamps

And then those food stamps are used at Walmart, its a win win for Walmart and Walmart. No other country gives their poor food stamps instead of money, I wonder why?

[krige]

Central Europeans tried it a few decades back. They do not want to go there again.

[eru]

> No other country gives their poor food stamps instead of money, I wonder why?

Are you sure about that?

[fragmede]

I'm projecting, but I think you're right. Not wanting to manage is probably a large driver. I can imagine that if you've dealt with messy humans before, that a robot receptionist that's not going to show up late, call out when hungover, need an advance for a family member's surgery and then quit, is quite attractive.

[loloquwowndueo]

Until the robot breaks for reasons unknown and you have to pay for expensive engineering time to fix it. Surprise, since the engineer vibe coded the whole thing, he also has no idea how to fix it except to get the AI to try.

[tmountain]

When AI is your hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[eru]

> If you see a value need for a receptionist, and you suspect that it is costing you thousands of dollars, wouldn't a normal response be, "I should think about hiring someone," [...]

If you only have thousands of dollars is savings from the move, hiring someone might be too expensive.

[deadbabe]

The cost of a few mistakes now and then is cheaper than hiring a full time receptionist and even paying their healthcare.

[6510]

You'd be surprised how many businesses don't answer their phone or chose not to answer based on who is calling.