Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course

[amghwk]

Offloading your brain work to "AI" is.....dumb.

Don't know where all these "AI" trend came from suddenly. AI this, AI that. It's nauseating.

 

[OortCloud]

I've used AI extensively in coding stuff and while it's really helpful it's also sketchy as hell. You always have to trawl the code it writes and you always have to fix things in it, or redo them. If you're lucky it writes code like you see in examples on the internet (hardly surprising given most of it's training is done by stealing code form the internet). In my experience this sort of code is ok as long as everything works as expected but It never copes with failures, handles exceptions etc and is often really inefficient. Any degree of defensive coding seems like a foreign concept to it. On a bad day it puts some really nasty and weird bugs in the code that without experience you wouldn't spot. So I'd say it's still no more than a tool a developer can use to make him more productive but that's all.

 

[pnntmp]

Customer service related to strictly technical issues, e.g. hardware or software problems, could be to a very large extent replaced with LLMs. Most problems people face are trivial and can be quickly resolved without calling a zillion times and listening to id1otic melodies while waiting 'our support specialists to become available'.
People are already switching to 'ask LLM first' approach to such issues.

For anything else however, talking to a videocard feels weird and frustrates people, so it may not become the new normal.

 

[doxcat]

Sorry, forgot where I was posting. And, not sure where you are from, but the US's education has been a dumpster fire for the last 20 years. Wonder who taught all those coders and programmers out there atm? Probably educators that degrees in edu and their field, that were knowledgeable and great teaching that knowledge. Now, not only do you not need an edu degree, but you dont even need a degree in the field in you teach anymore. That's gonna hurt.

This is accurate. My VB teacher about 25 years ago had a PhD in psychology. And the trend toward eliminating humanities classes from K-25 in favor of "learn to code" is leaving us with college graduates who can code, but have trouble thinking about the people who will be using it. Now they're supposed to understand how to make AI respond to the needs of people they never gave much thought to.

 

[Xelions]

came from basements not colleges, IRC channels in the 90s, Doom & Elder Scrolls mod communities, and software piracy groups. The point I'm making is most people who code are self-taught... I feel if you're waiting until you get accepted into a university program to start learning/writing code... you're way behind and will fight some serious impostor syndrome when you get into a room for sprint planning with those guys.

We don't really have basements in OZ

..but some of the examples you mentioned I can associate with. I remem IRC channels vaguely. I really preferred old style forums before the age of bullsh#$ liability. And modding was fun, for gaming, not just Doom and Elderscrolls. I went to college in OZ - what they taught was hmm and so read books and done some paid short courses. I remem the keygen music from software piracy groups

 

[maestro0428]

I thought for a moment this was another dumb a$$ tariff move by DJ Turnip to try and save his cuntry full of mindless vegetables from a possible recession.

Not all Americans are mindless vegetables.

 

[Watzupken]

We’ve used AI, and honestly, is this not to be expected? It’s a good tech, but overhyped to make it sound like it can do anything.

 

[Xelions]

Not all Americans are mindless vegetables.

I agree. There are a few smart people over there

The proof is in the pudding... Generally speaking the majority are mindless. - over 50% voted for DJ Turnip and the people that didn't vote without a good reason are too.

 

[Gezzer]

I remember way back in the day when EA used a key word recognition system for customer support and then eliminated live agents. Somehow they had named key pieces of software terms that were also common for other reasons. Their system would constantly misinterpret questions being asked and regurgitate totally useless solutions.

That is the key problem with using AI for customer support. The answers will only be as good as the questions asked and available solutions. Live agents can ask questions to drill down to the real problem. AFAIK AI can't do that, and instead will just get confused and hallucinate bad solutions. In the end you'll have a lot of AI systems telling customers to turn their systems on and off again and not much else IMHO.

 

[WaphleStomp]

AI customer support sucks. I've deleted every account I have which uses AI support, except for one which I mostly can't go without. AI support is frustrating and anger-inducing.