It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well-suited to the task and it's going to accelerate. It's a win for capital and the technology implementers, even if it's a loser for the call center employees and callers.

Some of the tech is pretty scary. One big vendor's solution [0] can provide not just AI agents but also use AI to snoop on calls in progress, evaluating sentiment from both sides [1], verifying phrases are said - pretty dystopian in theory. From experience, these things tend to go downhill based on the attitude at the top - is the mission to slash costs or take care of customers? A 1000 decisions follow from this one, and like Jira, it can be a useful tool or a prison-like hell.

[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/contac...

[1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-...

90% of the time when I call a call center I need a human to fix an organisational bug - e.g. faulty billing or some other kind of mixup. AI cannot help with this.

If it's to do something normal you could do through the website there was no need for AI - a website or app suffices - provided it isnt terrible.

Capital definitely thinks it can save costs here but capital is getting increasingly delusional these days.

so far, almost always when I get an AI responder I find it useless and basically try to get to a human as quickly as possible

if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself