First, most tech companies of comparable size to your customers have negative margins and survive on investment cycles, and the tech companies that are bigger haven't offered human support to anyone in decades. (And indeed, everyone already resents this practice and those tech companies. Generally, sentiment is abyssmal.)

I know you're just trying to illustrate the real plight of your customers, but it's a bad illustration that confuses the discussion.

Second, out of sincere curiosity: what was the future of the industry -- and these particular pharmacies -- if AI hadn't arrived to offer salvation? The role they fill in society is non-optional, so how the market restructuring around these infeasibly narrow margins before?

Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.

I wonder why? My pharmacy in Spain is owned by this older lady who's had this shop for life. Not too many customers but she manages and even has a few part time staff. It pays enough to make a living. And she always knows what I need and pings me on WhatsApp if something is ready for pickup. And there's 4 such neighborhood pharmacies within 200 metre walk. No kidding. All are viable.

I wonder, what changed in America? Why is the mom and pop pharmacy not viable anymore? This sounds like a much bigger problem than having to answer a couple of calls, really.

I don't really understand how everything turns into a mega corp with shareholders in the US. Sure we have some of those here too but why are small businesses not viable?

Clueless? You sound tone deaf. If you came here thinking everyone would love your product becase AI, well, sorry about that.

Just because you think it is an amazing product does not mean the rest of us will agree with you. It's right up there with "I've never had a problem with it so anyone claiming to have a problem is wrong" mentality. It was your comment acknowledging the public does not like your product or products like yours. You just think your product is better than others. That may be true but it again does not mean it is so good that the public enjoys interacting with your product.

> We are their lifeline.

Yeaaaah, I don't think that's true at all but I am glad it makes you feel virtuous and helpful.

Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day.

I have a lot of pharmacist relatives. This is news to them.

PBMs, private equity, and health insurance companies are what are crushing pharmacy margins. AI voice assistants will not last as a solution imho.

https://nashp.org/state-tracker/state-pharmacy-benefit-manag...

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-the-break-up-of-big-...

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharm...

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-real-reason-walgreens...

> But the real reason Walgreens, and the pharmacy business in general, is dying, is because of a failure to enforce antitrust laws against unfair business methods and illegal mergers. Elson touched on it when he mentioned lower reimbursement rates, but I don’t think people appreciate the full scope of what happened to Walgreens, and to the full pharmacy business in general. This is not a case of bad management, it’s a case of desperate management.

I'll gladly take a 20min hold after having to resort to screaming "give me a fucking human" or driving the the pharmacy JUST TO TALK TO a human in the exceptions, which seem to be about 75% of my interactions with CVS/Walgreens AI agents.

> EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls

So "AI" treats relatonal as excluding transactional??

EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls with no hold is a massive win.

You keep saying that reducing call time is the "win." It seems like that the only metric you're measuring. If so, your product is a failure, not a success.

This is HEALTHCARE. You don't get to do "rough around the edges." You don't get to dismiss edge cases.

I also work in healthcare tech. My company doesn't permit such things because people die. I'll write it again because it's a point that tech fetishes can't get into their heads:

People die.

Maybe “rock solid” could be understood as slightly hyperbolic (though it is metaphorical, so hard to say whether it is really hyperbole), but, it is possible to predict some things probabilistically with a high degree of accuracy. Depending on the task, a high enough degree of accuracy sounds doable, and if it offers a sufficiently convenient fallback to an actual human when it fails, that sounds like it could be quite a bit nicer than navigating a phone tree menu?

Classical voice to text combined with NN based voice to text, I would imagine can be highly accurate, and that’s probabilistic.

Yes

Anecdotal evidence to support this - on a much less important platform.

We have two cars from our local car dealership. When we first set up the account, we did it through what I assumed were some kind of AI voice prompts. First time we take my wifes car in? I'm getting the calls from the dealership about whats wrong. Then I start getting texts telling me the car is ready. Same thing with her, but she's getting all the calls and notifications when we take my car in.

This has gone on for THREE YEARS. Last year we just gave up after telling people in person and going online and changing it several times. It did work for one visit, then reverted right back to mixing them up.

This isn't nearly as important as your banking issues, but its in a completely different industry and the experience is nearly identical.

That's been my observation of AI customer support. They're pretty much all glorified FAQ reciters unable to handle any unusual or uncommon situation not in the FAQs.

With that experience, why have you stayed with that provider? It would seem to be no harder, and quite satisfying, to open new accounts with another provider for you and your wife, and then cancel these accounts.

Right, of the faster/better/cheaper triad, these things are overwhelmingly being implemented towards cheaper, and the idea that owners can gut the support structure for errors and edge-cases.

I realize quoting Doctorow on this is... rather low-hanging fruit for this topic, but I like how this scenario suggests the AI company makes more money when the implementation is hostile to the consumer:

> We’ve heard some pretty credible stuff about how AI can be used to spot solid mass tumors that sometimes humans miss. And, you know, if there was a sales call right now at your local hospital, where there was a pitchman for an AI company telling the hospital administrator, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Right now you have 10 radiologists. They cost $3 million a year. They review a hundred X-rays a day each. And I tell you what: I’m going to sell you a chatbot for a million bucks a year. And it’s going to sit in the shadows, and a couple of times a day, it’s going to tap your radiologist on the shoulder and say, 'Why don't you take another look at that one? I’d be very happy,’” that would seem like a real advance on medicine. But that’s not how the pitch is going.

> [...] But what the AI companies want to sell you is: fire nine-tenths of your radiologists, save $2.7 million a year, split that between the hospital shareholders and Sam Altman, take that remaining radiologist and put them in charge of marking the AI’s homework, put them in charge of clicking OK a hundred times a minute for the radiology reports that are coming out of the chatbot, and then, when it misses something and someone dies, blame that guy, make him what Dan Davies calls the “accountability sink” for the AI.

-- https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/25/reverse_centaur_docto...

I actually made another comment about lack of leadership causing many issues including exhausting dev teams.

What you describe is an execution failure not AI, these are basic NLP systems that could be easily configured with some dataset to make them better, but i will make a wild guess that the bank has incompetent manager who was pushing for some numbers to put in a slide to say “I” did this.

Yes, down to the false equivalence of "human hallucination" with AI hallucination. Except that a human who hallucinates too much will eventually be permanently discredited and especially so if that human is trying to be an expert in too many things. Yet we are asked over and over again to forgive the LLM's mistakes because of what it can do. Oh it can do this right, this was just one situation where it did something wrong. So tiresome.