I think eventually you probably will not able to tell whether support is ai or human. models and agents will only continue to improve, and customer support is one of the clearest business use case. For companies, ai is cheaper, scalable and does not require the same onboarding process and training process. so in that sense, yes, it probably becomes the new normal. My guess is in the long term, we will have something like a hybrid model. Where ai answers repetitive questions and straightforward workflows, while humans can answers the nuance.

Yes. Because, the incentives for companies are too big to ignore. The math being done right now is $10/hr for voice support in (say) the Phillipines is much more than $0.10/hr having an AI do it, even factoring in the cost of some customer churn. And the risk of the latter for some services can be discounted to zero if the user has no viable alternative.

Second, the best support line is one where no one calls in. So there are strong incentives to make it hard to do so, either positive (create good self service options) or bad (hide the number, hide emails, etc).

If you don't want this future then make sure you always ask for the human and constructively provide feedback that you will penalize any supplier that relies on it.

We are already in a K shaped economy wrt call centers. Being a very frequent Hilton hotel guest, say, gets you a separate call center number, US based live human support, people who can solve your problem, etc. Not being a Hilton member gets you the 45 minute wait and a bot.

Voice agents are a royal pita. They have trouble with any kind of British regional accent, they are tiny models because anything usable is too slow, and they have zero capability because they'd probably mangle the toolcalls anyway.

Elevenlabs using a completely incapable voice agent for sales outreach made me wonder if they were actively trying to dissuade customers.

It feels like the sort of thing a disinterested engineer implemented to appease a manager fixated on the shiny.

The real fun one is calling the utility company to report a downed line from a pole snapped in half and the bot agent doesn’t transfer you to a human even when you say “emergency”, “public hazard”, “utility pole obstructing a roadway”, “potential property damage your corporation will be liable for”, “immenient danger to life and limb” or any and all applicable keyword variations that might warrant humanly answering (and, to add insult to injury, cannot take a report of the event either but simply ends 10 of your calls in a row with a texted link to livechat with its textbot sibling). Like +−×÷ says nearby, it’s austerity.

It’s part of the continual squeeze of more water out of the same rock

Something that was table stakes in the past would now be seen as crazy for a company to spend money on

I believe customer support should actually be done by humans, as customers feel undervalued when they talk to scrappy voice agents, atleast make an effort to use good ones, so it tries to speak like humans

It seems that low quality human customer support, or rather, no support at all, has been normal for some time. I don't enjoy talking to an AI, but if they are constructed to be efficiently helpful, I welcome it, grudgingly.

Until it either gets good, or consumers revolt against it.

AI is essentially austerity. We're going to get synthetic/inferior versions of many products and services, wherever using AI can make them cheaper to produce. Companies no longer fear losing customers because customers have proven so passive and docile as these forces have already started to accelerate over the last decade.