> why not just talk to an AI NOW until a human can come online?

There is no difference between talking to an AI and getting nothing accomplished and just waiting on hold and getting nothing accomplished.

This is a shallow dismissal. The idea is that the AI has a chance of helping you and that is valuable during a period where you can't get access to a human and otherwise would have no chance of getting help.

tbh i would rather talk to AI that can accomplish tasks for me rather than talking to human customer support that will require me to wait on call for 30 minutes and then get routed to different departements and explain the issue again and again and then get to someone who can actually do what i want them to do . I dont think todays AI can do that but we will get there.

ignoring the logical leaps made here, there a huge number of steps in can tick off, like collecting information, common troubleshooting steps and all that being fed to the live agent at the end, it might seem like "nothing accomplished" to you because you're shallow minded, but in reality its extremely useful.

If AI chatbots actually gathered information that was then forwarded to the live agent once you reached them then I'd find that tolerable, but I've literally never seen that be the case. In practice every time I get to an actual human I've had to completely start over from scratch.

>ignoring the logical leaps made here, there a huge number of steps in can tick off, like collecting information, common troubleshooting steps and all that being fed to the live agent at the end

None of that requires "aRtIfIcIaL iNtElLiGeNcE".

In fact, those tasks been accomplished for quite some time without it.

Back in the mid-'00s when Verizon was rolling out FIOS they MAC-locked their DHCP to their routers so when deploying my own router, I had to punch my way through a bot suggesting that I "turn it off and on again" and "clear my browser cache" while waiting on the phone to say the magic words to a human.

Now an AI does it even worse (though Verizon fixed their DHCP handling). The dumbest aspect of the AI bots is when they do the fake "typing" indicator instead of just spitting out their useless drivel as fast as I can read it, that's a +1 for the old-skool tree-based bots.

>AI Chatbots have been outperforming human agents in every category imaginable.

Would love to see a source for this claim.

Comcast “customer service” was already such an abysmal experience in 2006 that I find it hard to believe anyone longs for that again. I spent 3 hours on the phone trying to get a $50 correction to my bill that that summer when I was a broke grad student as I got railroaded around a call center in India.

That’s a system designed not to help you. Maybe they’re doing the same thing now, but framing AI as the problem lets these companies off the hook for what I’d consider “working as intended”.

I've found Amazon's customer support bot excellent for teeing up a chat with an actual human support agent. It collects all the context up front so the actual chat is about the substance of the issue. Still need a human for taking follow up actions in most cases though (ie. processing a refund, contacting the seller on your behalf, etc)

And yet your response sounds like a bot promoting AI chatbots. Outperforming human agents in every category? Not in my experience, some of which have been terrible.