So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.

This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.

Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.

Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.

I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.

In one case I was literally repeating back to the human what I’d just been told, and getting them to confirm that what I said was correct. First bill arrives and I find out the truth.

Second case I was told I’d have to cancel and create a new account to add a service. I decided to keep my existing account and learned that there is a web page where I can easily self-serve and add the additional service in one or two clicks. (I assume like the human actually made more money for “new account signups”.

My point is that the feeling of being a valued customer is really independent of whether you’re interacting with a human.

Hopefully Salesforce did their due diligence, because the "AI agent" story here on Intercom (Fin) seems highly inflated. The product seems to be a a hybrid of RAG, some post trained models, curated help center content, custom answers, workflows, a bunch of if-else rules, API connectors, escalation logic, and specially generous resolution accounting.

Calling every solved interaction with the "AI did it" is misleading unless they separate confirmed resolutions from assumed resolutions, and disclose how much came from rules and workflows or custom answers versus LLM reasoning...

From their own docs, it seems a Fin "outcome" can be counted on, not only when a customer confirms resolution, but also ...when the customer simply does not ask for more help after Fin responds...A very soft resolution metric...

However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.

For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.

On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.

That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.

It could be great but it’s already awful.

But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.

AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.