I try to warn my small business clients who ask for this.

You know those annoying AI bots the big companies use?

Well yours will be worse because you don't have their budget and it will drive what few customers who stumble upon your site away instantly.

Your own authentic voice answering a customer query directly is one of the few advantages a small business has over the big guys.

Not to mention liability if the agent says something misleading. You won't be able to afford the lawyers the big guys can to get yourself off the hook.

No kidding. If they won’t pick up the phone to take my business, imagine when I’m calling after they already have my money.

Yep. I had a recurring contract with a local service company that got bought out by a larger one. Old company had an email that I could message and immediately get a useful reply back from a human. New ownership got rid of that, and their website messaging didn't work. The only way to contact them was to call on the phone.

Who is the phone answered by? A crappy AI voice bot. Getting past that wasted a bunch of my time, followed by talking to person who was useless. Then I finally got through to someone who could actually do something for me. At that point the only help I wanted was to immediately close my account and never do business with them again.

I've posted several reviews recently on Google, rating the company 1 star and warning that they're customer support is using AI agents that are unhelpful and try to waste your time. The other crazy thing is restaurants who use AI generated pictures in their marketing. Instant yuck.

Cue both of them sending you a weekly newsletter from now on, from which you can't unsubscribe from, for the next 30 years.

On the other hand, I am also looking for a contractor to do my concrete. I hate the whole process, I hate calling people only to spend 5 minutes trying to explain what I want and then they don’t provide that service or try to convince me to do something else, and then seeing bids and not really understanding what things are important and if I am getting a good price.

I would love for an agent to just be able to handle all this for me. Find me a good, fair price from a reliable contractor who understands what I want. I don’t want to have to call a bunch of people, just do it for me.

I tried seeing if an agent could help me with this, but it isn’t quite there yet. It did a good job helping me figure out what I really wanted, but not the rest of it.

There are some businesses I don't want to contact anyone.

when finding an emergency plumber or a tow truck, it seems all the companies you can contact are just scummy intermediaries that call a normal business and take a cut.

I added emergency road service to my car insurance just so I wouldn't have to search for a tow company myself.

Its annoying because thats what people want from small business but as a contractor you're usually working so you have to do your trade and be available to take calls like a receptionist. Better if they'd just send an email or use the online booking form.

How is that a legit case? The providers will hang up. The bot will take a maybe and assume yes. Why on earth would you trust this task to an agent when the consequences of a "my mistake you are absolutely right to call that out" could be hundreds of thousands of dollars?

> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable

To fix the health care system is possible.

To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.

In that case the startups should be able to defend themselves against the social stigma - "sure, there's a stigma against doing this, but here's why we think it's worthwhile anyway in this case".

For example, data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable. There are startups that are using voice AI agents to call providers and ask them "hey are you still accepting these insurance plans?"

Why are you assembling a list of what health plans different doctors take? That sounds like a spamhaus scraping the real world for leads.

Every health care provider in America will tell you the same thing: "Call your insurance company to verify coverage." Every insurance company in America will tell you, "Call us to verify coverage."

Nobody outside of the patient, the doctor, and the payor (insurance company) has a need to know those things. Your "AI agent" certainly does not.

That sounds like a terrible use-case unless there’s already a pre-existing relationship with the provider, and it seems questionable even then.

So what, just broadly accept less realistic acting agents and lower the cost for bad actors?

I mean sending messages to someone who you know is a human being - a friend, a coworker, a subject-expert, a journalist.

If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.

I don't have and don't want to have an agent

Yeah but you can’t blame an agent or emotionally abuse it…

In that case the social stigma won't matter. Do you care if the support agents at faceless companies are annoyed with you?

A stigma should affect you when dealing with friends, business contacts, or anyone for whom the quality of your relationship is important going forward.