▲ 1084 points
back
577 comments
>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today
This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more.
Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.
What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest
This reminds me that I have to write my dentist. They replaced their beep answering machine with an AI chatbot, and the experience is horrible. I just want to say what I want, have it transcribed to text, and then have a human do something about it. It. I don't want to have to slowly explain to a bot who is just going to do the same thing.
Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.
I recently took my car to the dealership to get my A/C fixed. On the drive home, I discovered that they'd somehow screwed up my blinkers when they were fixing their A/C. When I called the next day to explain the problem, confirm they knew it was their issue to fix at no cost and to schedule a time to come in I got an AI Assistant. An AI Assistant that has not been trained to expect an issue to be their fault and who kept trying to direct me book on their site or to book a new appointment to get the problem fixed at my cost through her.
The dealership's decision to hand things over to AI, and to choose to focus that AI on only booking appointments instead of fixing problems is a proverbial F U to me. It's the dealership shifting more work on to me. It's disrespectful and wasteful of my time. By the time I managed to get to a human I was angry and distrustful.
The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.
I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.
I went through the text logs for ours and it was all:
"Fuck off and pass me to a human" and stuff like that.
No one wants this who's calling you. We are literally damaging our company with it.
My main issue with these systems is that they tend to not be able to do anything beyond what I can do myself in whatever self-service portal is available. If I'm calling, it's because I need support beyond what the bot can probably provide, and it just becomes a matter of arguing with the robot to get to a human who can actually solve my problem.
I was helping an 80+ year old with a phone problem this week. Dealing with the AI CSA was so frustrating. I don't think this lady was ready to burn down data centers that morning, but I think she was looking for a pitchfork by the afternoon.
I immediately skip all youtube ads that are AI generated, and I can easily spot them. Not just that, I am planning to actively avoid those brands that are doing this. A small way to send a message that this form of AI sucks. In addition, I make it a point to compliment humans that assist me in customer support, and ask them to tell their management that they need to hire more humans.
I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.
This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices.
We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.
Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.
Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.
For most consumers AI will be a net negative. Already I can tell more and more companies use it in their call centers and support workflows, often just to stonewall customers: they reply very politely and with great attention to detail but will not solve your issue as they don’t have any decision power.
I really don’t look forward to this new world, AI is a powerful and useful too for creators but it will and already is used for all the wrong reasons, apparently even to pick which targets to destroy in war, essentially making life or death decisions in some areas with little to no oversight. And then people here think that any kind of regulation around this tech is useless and unwarranted…
Don’t get me wrong I use AI all the time but I fear it will be the most disruptive technological development in both positive and negative ways that we have ever dealt with.
AI feels like “quick and cheap at the cost of quality” so I completely get why consumers would dislike it while business people love it.
Oh no. It can't really be because "AI" frequently means "we fire employees to make more money. And by the way, we don't actually care about quality". Right?
"Why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or services."
- Steve Jobs
I have yet to see AI being successfully onboarded in brands where I feel it actually benefits me.
QuickBooks has annoying suggestions that shift the whole UI and cannot be disabled. Misclicks now happen.
The AI in my robot vacuum is... just a label? I don't want to talk to it. I want it to deterministically clean my stuff.
My TV got an upgrade to Gemini. Why? I don't talk to the TV, and it's in my face. (I'm think about getting a device that can do Plex->Atmos streaming).
Imagine the dotcom boom but most consumers have a negative sentiment towards internet stuff, it's mostly just CEOs measuring their internet dicks against each other.
I’m sure there are some good AI products but the vast majority seem to be garbage. The exception is coding agents and simple web text/image interfaces.
So yeah, as a signal the AI brand is about as bad as it gets. Crypto tier. But just like crypto, the investors want to see that signal regardless of any underlying substance.
I had the pleasure of communicating with the AI bot of FedEx (in Germany) today:
> Everything is sorted out!
> Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you.
Maybe if marketing people stopped using the incredibly generic term "AI", and started actually saying what something is, it might work better. When you say "this app is powered by AI", do you mean Skynet, an LLM, or a basic machine learning system?
Once a negative connotation takes over a word, there's almost no coming back from it. When practically every public implementation of AI is negative, people are going to permanently associate negative thoughts towards it. We saw the saw thing when the prospect of AI came to video game development. People had high hopes that it could really improve things but no, all that was scene was lazy, half baked, terrible implementations of AI in video game development and now the general view of AI in that sphere is automatically hated.
AI isn’t actually a description of consumer value. It’s a tool to create that value
Selling an “AI” product is like describing a C++ compiler as a feature to someone buying a video game
We are adding AI features to our product and being very careful to disguise them and make it not “feel” like AI.
Our customer base about 70% can’t stand AI, 20% doesn’t care, and 10% thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world.
To me AI in marketing is a signal that whatever business I'm looking at will pivot when a fad comes along. That is not what I want in any service that I plan to use for a long time.
My laptop has a microsoft copilot key built into it. It is hardware mapped to a hotkey that inputs win+shift+f23, instead of just being the right ctrl key. Why would anyone want this?
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
--Steve Jobs
It's a bit like 25 years ago when people were slapping web on everything to make it seem better.
Part of this is incentivized by investors that want everything they invest in to be an AI thingy so they can feel good about themselves. So, you have a lot of startups optimizing for that. This is not a new thing of course. Every if-else type logic got shamelessly labeled AI at some point even fifteen years ago. I've been in a few places where that happened.
Other than that, I can't see why consumers should care for most things they actually buy and pay for.
But of course they tend to fall in the feature matrix trap where when faced with choice between product A and product B, they tend to go for the one with the most elaborate spec sheet. Even if most of that is just meaningless word soup to them. True for phones, TVs, stereo equipment, cars, etc. Most people really have no clue what they are buying so they just over pay under the assumption that it will cover their needs. AI goes in a long list of meaningless marketing language that companies use to market their products. Most people say they are not sensitive to that, but their purchase choices usually tell a different story. Marketing people know that.
The label is now on ... pretty much everything -- to the point where it's completely meaningless. So, maybe everyone can just stop lazily slapping it on things?
You can already see what's coming, too. At some point in the near future, companies will make a point of offering products without AI (to whatever extent) and start offering the bespoke, organic or Classic (i.e. Mexican Coke) versions and charging even more for them.
I’m surprised it’s just sixty. I don’t think anyone, not the least consumers, wants AI used upstream of themselves.
This reminds me of [Steve Job's response about OpenDoc at a conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o) where he points out that focus on the tech isn't as important as focus on the product. Companies are pitching the technology first and not the product, but customers want the product.
I'm looking at AI in a product as a way to tell it what to do without me needing to look up what I want to do... And it usually doesn't do that.
For example:
I wanted to make a pie chart in Excel of 5 cells, so I selected them and told Copilot to make a pie chart. It put a pie chart image in the chat window, and told me where to click to make the pie chart, but didn't actually make the pie chart for me.
Sometimes my phone's camera saves a picture in the wrong orientation, and I don't feel like digging around for where Google put the rotate button today. There's an easily-accessible prompt box, but it can't follow "rotate the image 90 degrees to the left".
---
The thing is, unless you use an app to do a task all the time, often it takes longer to find the button, remember the keystroke, or look it up on Google than it takes to just bang out a prompt. And, if I can tell my IDE to "write a unit test for this class" and get back something useful, why can't I tell Excel to "make a pie chart for these cells" and get back something useful?
I think what a lot of tech people don't understand is how little most people care about technology. People want products that work well. If you can find a solution that serves people's needs then they don't really care about the underlying technology.
For example, apart from my day job, I do IT consulting for small local businesses. I do anything from landing pages to AI integration into their existing processes to make them more efficient at their work. The end result is their customers getting faster and better quality service, and my customers get to focus more on their business instead of administration. They don't really care that it's AI, but they do care about the results.
And I think that's the part many executives are missing. Focus on building great products. If AI is part of it, cool. But unless you're OpenAI or Anthropic, AI is probably not your product.
Turns out people hate the thing they're being told is going to steal their life from them (often with a shit eating grin).
This is what happens when you run dark strategies. They might work for a little bit in small doses, but eventually they bite you in the ass.
I agree. What does it matter if it is AI? As long as the product does what it is supposed to do, use of AI is secondary.
The word "turnoff' is an understatement. The rubes try to sell it like the Monorail on the Simpsons. They're pushier than a timeshare. Feels like a scam.
I was promised 10000 AI scientists curing cancer and solving fusion but all I got was unemployment and short videos of fruit people cheating on their partner.
Customers do not care how things work under the hood - they only care about how well the feature works for them. There is no good reason to communicate that you’re using AI, other than to impress VC types.
I actually think the word “AI” in a name undersells the feature. “Background Remover” sounds like a more robust tool than “AI Background Remover”.
You mean the Coke flavour co-created by AI wasn't a resounding success with consumers? Who could have possibly known?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...
When you label anything with an electrical current AI, ignore all copyright, then cite AI as cause for layoffs ... what do you expect? It's all vibes. Qwen released "world models" that are video processing models instructed through text. Words have no real meaning anymore.
Could be worse. It could be Blockchain.
Couldn't agree more. There will be marketing trend for authenticity and real interactions. At least I hope so.
Personally I am at the moment that when I even slightly feel something may be AI output… I just stop reading. Sometimes it's just false positive, but there are some senstences / styling so ai-looking that I'm just tired off, even if its written by human.
In comments I see a lot about chatbots… Yep, it's just the worst of the worst. Most (all?) are just not helpful at all. Spinning around same things, but never ones you'd need. Sometimes I just feel they're programmed in a way to exhaust me to ditch and ignore the problem I had.
Just clearly explain how you are translating all the AI "value" into a reduced price for me - consumer, and it will be welcome.
E.g. Spotify is using AI extensively, consequently I expect them to reduce the price very soon. Maybe like a 50% cut.
The AI branding isn't aimed at consumers, it's aimed at investors. What consumers think about it is irrelevant.
This isn't unique to tech, either. In recent years, I've started to notice all the advertising around me increasingly targeting businesses and investors rather than the average person. Feels like we're quickly moving towards a post-consumer society, in which trying to convince the average middle class consumer to buy your product is no longer relevant, because that's simply not where the money is anymore.
One of the best ads of seen is for the Ava AI Sales Agent. I have to stare at it because of its location near one of my favorite spots. They've found a model with dead eyes that perfectly capture the existential dread you feel as you see a future with fewer humans in your life, and instead it's just more machines.
Not sure if that's their conscious intention, but somewhere along the creative process, some living soul was able to express itself in the final product.
Outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber the attitude towards AI has shifted dramatically over the last few months. Folks still think the tech is cool but everyone is fed up with AI slop and all the noise and hype that’s failed to deliver.
The mood has shifted dramatically, but that wouldn’t be obvious to anyone that never leaves tech circles where it’s still all AI all the time.
> Al Ries asserted that a brand is a singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of a prospect.
>
> Source: https://heidicohen.com/what-is-branding [2011-08-15]
The keyword - mind. That is, a human being is supposed to stand behind a "brand", who is responsible for it, and is to be trusted for the product, the effort, the experience they offer.Consumers are tired of going through a popup slideshow of "Try our new AI features!" they won't use every time their apps update.
Anyone who worked in tech long enough knows that tech-first marketing only works in summer very specific situations and for very specific segments. Most customers care only about whether the system solves their problem in the minimum amount of time/money/effort. Branding a specific solution to their problem is usually a sure way to get them to feel cheated.