The hardest thing to believe is that call centers still had humans somewhere to call/answer calls
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Makes sense to me. AI bullshit generators may be worse than useless for most of the things people try to do with them, but they might just be the perfect tool for rationalizing the systematic looting of formerly productive companies by private equity.
No human should work in a call center
Having worked in a call center (doing survey research) during college, there are a lot of people employed by such places who really wouldn’t have many employment options anywhere else.
I remember saying, while there, that the entire industry would be replaced by AI in 10-15 years. They all scoffed, saying they had ways to get people to answer surveys that an AI wouldn’t be able to do. I told them they were being naive.
Here we are.
That said, I do worry about some of those people. Just because they were borderline unemployable doesn’t mean they were worthless.
There was a lot of talk about that when the call centers were sprouting up: generally poor jobs, minimum wage, and liable to be outsourced or ai’d. They were generally put places where there were no real options so those towns are going to suffer when it all goes away
doesn’t mean they were worthless
Not what I said, on the contrary.
It's a horrible mindnumbing job and anyone deserves better.
The avg of employment is 6 months.
Some don't make their targets and get fired, most find a less shitty job.
Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t accusing you of saying they were worthless. I was just voicing my own concern for some of my former coworkers.
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God I cannot wait for this AI bubble to pop.
No one should have to work in a call center, but I’m still hopeful about this being a good place for ai. Compared to crappy voice menus we have today, there’s a lot of potential
A huge part of the problem with voice menus is how tightly they’re scripted. They can only work for narrow use cases where you’re somehow knowledgeable enough to find the magic phrasing while being ignorant enough to have simple use cases and only do things the way they thought of.
Ai has the potential to respond to natural language and reply with anything in a knowledge base, even synthesize combinations. It could be much better than scripted voice menus are: more importantly it could be cheaper to implement so might actually happen.
I actually just did an evaluation of such a tool for internal support. This is for software engineers and specific to our company so not something you’re going to find premade. We’ve been collecting stuff in a wiki and just needed to point the agent at the wiki. The ai part was very successful, even if you think of it as a glorified search feature. It’s good at turning natural language questions into exactly what you need, and we just need to keep throwing stuff into the wiki!
Unfortunately I had to reject it for failing on the basics. For example it was decent at guiding you to write a work ticket when needed but there was no way to configure a url for our internal ticketing system. And there was no way to tell it to shut up.
Compared to crappy voice menus we have today, there’s a lot of potential
It's easy to get above rock bottom. Today's voice menus are already openly abusive of the customers.
Oh, demoralizing thought, when the AI call center agent becomes intentionally abusive... and don't think that companies, and especially government agencies, won't do that on purpose.
I have actually had semi-positive experiences with AI chat bot front ends, they're less afraid to refer to an actual human being who might know something as opposed to the call center front line humans who seem to be afraid they might lose their job if they admit the truth: that they have absolutely no clue how to help you.
Shifting the balance, drop the number of virtually untrained humans in the system by half, train the remaining ones twice as much, and let AI fill in for routing you to a hopefully appropriate "specialist."
I think there's good potential where the caller needs information.
But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they're allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.
Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.
I can definitely see the fear of letting ai do something like that. Someone will always try to trick it. That’s why we can’t have good things.
However, like you said, they didn’t think to make that an option in the voice menu. If it were an AI, you could drop the process into the knowledge base and have it available much more easily than reprogramming the voice menu
Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it's easier to pretend it doesn't occur, and you don't need to record specific metrics if it's a generic "manual fix by CS" issue. It's easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.
To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.
The future is bright! /s
So bright we had to remove the lampshade!
Wait, it’s all scams?!