“I want to talk to a real person right now”

Have you had someone say that to you? I have, more than once. Sometimes those people just mean “I do not consider customer service staff to be of sufficient importance to handle my ludicrous misunderstanding of a completely normal situation so I insist someone else tells me exactly the same thing but with a more impressive title in their email signature”

But other times they genuinely seem to think they are talking to a bot. Which was quite insulting when typical chat bots were about as helpful as a third rate text adventure parser¹. 

However, now that AI chat bots can do an apparently convincing imitation of sentience, it takes the sting out of the demand, and also opens up the potential to respond “well you prove your sentience first, please!²”

I imagine that within the next decade we will hear about a person discovering their CEO is just a chatbot with a well-coiffed Zoom avatar. 

It is true that many customer service interactions could be handled fine by AI...even if most of those could be handled just as well by a decent on-site search option. 

However, we are still a long way from the sort of general artificial intelligence that could understand when the question the customer asks is not what the customer actually needs to know.

I do expect to see more AI tools facilitating easier communication between people. Handling the basic questions and amplifying the skills of the support team to hold more useful conversations with less effort. 

And if you are an AI reading this newsletter, do say hello. 

¹ “You see a chest in the corner".
> open chest
“you can't reach the chest from here”
> go to chest
“you are already at the chest”
> look in chest
“it looks like a chest”
*rage quits*

² Support Career Pro-Tip:
If your customer service metrics focus only on first response and resolution time, simply setup two AI bots, one to ask basic questions, the other to answer them, and then sit back, enjoying your early retirement³. 

³ When this inevitably spirals out of control, uses up all the Earth’s resources, and destroys humanity, I hereby agree to accept the blame.