This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.
/s
This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.
from what I've seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.
I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.
Sounds like everything's working as intended from Amazon's perspective.
That is on purpose they want it to be as difficult as possible.
I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.
I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.
These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.
If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.
And a lot of burnt carbon to get there :(
Good. AI models don't have mouths to feed at home, people do.
You've heard of Early Adopters
Now get ready for Early Abandoners.
If I have to deal with AI for customer support then I will find a different company that offers actual customer support.
It's always funny how companies who want to adopt some new flashy tech never listen to specialists who understand if something is even worth a single cent, and they always fell on their stupid face.
If the customer support of my ISP doesn't even know what CGNAT is, but AI knows, I am actually troubled whether this is a good move or not.
Try asking for a level 2 support tech. They'll normally pass your call to someone competent without any fuss.
See thats just it, the AI doesn't know either it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.
If it has any power to make changes to your account then its going to be mistakenly turning peoples services on or off, leaking details, etc.
it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.
That's not correct and over simplifies how LLMs work. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying though.
You're wrong but I'm glad we agree.
So providing NO assistance to customers turned out to be a bad idea?
THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME IN THE HISTORY OF CUSTOMER SERVICE!
Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble with burst along with it and I don't have to listen to techbros drone on about how it's going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.
Amen to that 🙏
I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support "solutions", ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it's funny how our prompts looked something like:
etc. It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.
I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.
I called the local HVAC company and they had an AI rep. The thing literally couldn't even schedule an appointment and I couldn't get it to transfer me to a human. I called someone else. They never even called me back so they probably don't even know they lost my business.
is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I'm getting deja vu
It happens a lot.
I often choose my HVAC, plumber, electrician and lawn care teams in the same manner.
I call all of them. None answer. Few have voicemail set up. I leave voicemail with full contact info. I submit all of their web forms. Maybe one of them answer the phone, or calls back, or replies to the web form. I usually go with that one, if I haven't already fixed it using YouTube, by then.
The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.
The bad thing: half of them haven't.
Hopefully that half will go out of business.
