Comment by ageitgey

Over the past 5 years, there have been many startups that are variations of "AI can now automate interacting with companies that don't want to interact with you." This is common in healthcare, FinTech, consumer shopping, etc.

There are so many examples:

- We're going to automate provider availability, scheduling and booking hair/doctor/spa/whatever appointments for your users with AI phone calls

- We're going to sell a consumer device you talk to that will automate all your app interactions using "large action models"

- We're going to automate all of your hospital's health insurance company billing interactions with AI screen scrapers

- We're going to record your employees performing an action once in any business software tool and then automate it forever with AI to tie all your vendor systems together without custom programming.

- We're going to be able to buy anything for you from any website, automatically, no matter what fraud checks exist, because AI

Most of these start-ups are not "fraudulent"—they start with the best intentions (qualified tech founders, real target market, customers willing to pay if it works), but they eventually fail, pivot completely, or have to resort to fraud in a misguided attempt to stay alive.

The problem is that they are all using technology to try to solve a human problem. The current state of the world exists because the service provider on the other side of the equation doesn't want to be disintermediated or commoditized. They aren't going to sit there and be automated into compliance. If you perfect a way to call them with robots, they will stop answering the phone. If you perfect a way to automate their iPhone app on behalf of a user, they will block your IP address range and throw up increasingly arcane captchas. If you automate their login flows, they will switch to a different login flow or block customers they think are using automation. Your customer's experience is inconsistent at best, and you can never get rid of the humans in the loop. It leads to death by a thousand paper cuts until you bleed to death - despite customers still begging to pay for your service.