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While I get the vibes, and have had experience of human customer support being very weird on a few occasions, replacing mediocre humans with mediocre AI isn't a win for customers getting actual solutions.

And right now, the LLMs aren't really that smart, they're making up for low intelligence by being superhumanly fast and able to hold a lot of context at once. While this is better than every response being from a randomly selected customer support agent (as I've experienced), and when they don't even bother reading their own previous replies when the randomiser puts the same person in the chain more than once, it's not great.

LLM customer support can seem like a customer win to start with, when the AI is friendlier etc., but either the AI is just being more polite about the fixed corporate policy, or the LLM is making stuff up when it talks to you.



I think there's an interesting implication here: that the actually good (for the customer) support experience is a real human who has access to a RAG where they can look up company documents/policies/procedures, but still be able to use their human brain to make judgement calls (and, of course, they have to be willing to, y'know, read the notes left by the previous rep).


> replacing mediocre humans with mediocre AI isn't a win for customers getting actual solutions.

No it's not, but that's not what I described. I described replacing mediocre humans with better AI for at least the first level of customer service.




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