Comment by swiftcoder
1 day ago
> shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is
Nicely fitting the pattern where everyone who is bullish on AI seems to think that everyone else's specialty is ripe for AI takeover (but not my specialty! my field is special/unique!)
I was closer to upper-middle management and executives, it could have done the things I did (consultant to those people) and that they did.
It couldn't/shouldn't be responsible for the people management aspect but the decisions and planning? Honestly, no problem.
As someone who does support I think the end result looks a lot different.
AI, for a lot of support questions works quite well and does solve lots of problems in almost every field that needs support. The issue is this commonly removes the roadblocks from your users being cautious to doing something incredibly stupid that needs support to understand what they hell they've actually done. Kind of a Jeavons Paradox of support resources.
AI/LLMs also seem to be very good at pulling out information on trends in support and what needs to be sent for devs to work on. There are practical tests you can perform on datasets to see if it would be effective for your workloads.
The company I work at did an experiment on looking at past tickets in a quarterly range and predicting which issues would generate the most tickets in the next quarter and which issues should be addressed. In testing the AI did as well or better than the predictions we had made that the time and called out a number of things we deemed less important that had large impacts in the future.
Tickets are a very different domain though. Tickets are the easiest use case for AI (as you have the least constraints on real-time interaction), but reference cases in tickets have ridiculously low true-resolution (customer did not contact you about the same issue again).
The default we've seen is naive implementations are a wash. Bad AI agents cause more complex support cases to be created, and also make complex support cases the ones that reach reps (by virtue of only solving easy ones). This takes a while to truly play out, because tenured rep attrition magnifies the problem.
I think that's more the area I'd expect genAI to be useful (support folks using it as a tool to address specific scenarios), rather than just replacing your whole support org with a branded chatbot - which I fear is what quite a few management types are picturing, and licking their chops at the resulting cost savings...
to be fair at least half of the software engineers i know are facing some level of existential crisis when seeing how well claude code works, and what it means for their job in the long term
and these are people are not junior developers working on trivial apps
Yeah, I've watched a few peers go down this spiral as well. I'm not sure why, because my experience is that Claude Code and friends are building a lifetime of job security for staff-level folks, unscrewing every org that decided to over-delegate to the machine
Cleanup is less enjoyable than product building. If every future job is cleaning up a massive pile of AI slop, then that is a less fulfilling world than currently.
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I feel grateful that I retired a few years ago and no longer have to make a living being a developer.
Perhaps even more-so given the following tagline, "Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-middle management and executives than it is the customer service problems", lol. I suppose it's possible eightysixfour is an upper-middle management executive though.
Consultant to, so yes. It could have replaced me and a ton of the work of the people I was supporting.
Ah I see, that definitely lends some weight claim then.
> bullish [...] but not my specialty
IMO we can augment this criticism by asking which tasks the technology was demoed on that made them so excited in the first place, and how much of their own job is doing those same tasks--even if they don't want to admit it.
__________
1. "To evaluate these tools, I shall apply them to composing meeting memos and skimming lots of incoming e-mails."
2. "Wow! Look at them go! This is the Next Big Thing for the whole industry."
3. "Concerned? Me? Nah, memos and e-mails are things everybody does just as much as I do, right? My real job is Leadership!"
4. "Anyway, this is gonna be huge for replacing staff that have easier jobs like diagnosing customer problems. A dozen of them are a bigger expense than just one of me anyway."