The Coming AI Customer Service Utopia

We all hate voice systems. You wind up having a problem with some company you do business with, you call, and then you get hung up on because none of the menu options are correct. You call back, finally figure out how to talk to a person —which usually involves figuring out which menu to bluff by not choosing an option, I just did this yesterday with Xfinity— and they have no record of having spoken with you before. Then that person can’t help you and they transfer you over to someone else, except they didn’t explain the situation so you have to start all over again. Also they mess up whatever you needed and you call back and do the whole thing all over again. Occasionally, they’re extremely rude because they have compassion fatigue from listening to people yell at them every day.

Providing you with good customer service, where you pick up the phone and talk to an experienced friendly expert right away is too expensive for any company but the most luxurious of luxury brands.

Part of the reason I’ve been so busy lately is because this is about to change. I know it’s about to change because I’ve already seen it work. You’ll be able to pick up a phone, say what your problem is to a voice that distinctly belongs to whatever company you do business with, and that voice will just solve your whole problem for you. Or problems, if you have more than one. If you don’t speak English, that’s fine. That voice speaks every major language on Earth. It works in every department. It knows every relevant fact. You just say what you need and it does it. If you ask for something it actually can’t do, it logs this and spits it out in a report in a clean countable category and explains what you need to a person who can help. That report is then used to prioritize new feature updates. The person who helps you has a conversation, but the forms on their screen fill themselves out, and their whole job is to press one button at the end and then provide feedback on the AI model performance. The last part is largely ceremonial and they’re just there to prove the system still works.

Here’s the kicker. That voice will not be able to lie to you. If it