Comment by tmpz22

5 days ago

What are some useful ways SaaS companies are using AI? Great way to axe your customer support team.

I don't know about useful, but the most visible one is copywriting. Even when there's a human involved, every startup/small org I know runs content through them. (And that includes this article.) It's definitely something that companies want even if they don't necessarily need it (like analytics).

By far the best AI+human customer support mechanism I've experienced is through SMS/messages. They support auth, they're asynchronous, there's no app or custom interface to timeout, it's easy to send complex queries as text and you have the log right there. Apple does this really well. Delta also does, surprisingly, because their AI phone bot is garbage. It's also presumably easier for the human agents to multi-task.

  • Do you folks know any support bot which is actually useful to the customer? No, I don't mean cheap for the company, I mean helping, I mean fulfilling the goal for which (at least according on the powerpoints) it exists?

In Xero for example I can search for invoices or contacts in a much slower and more cumbersome fashion in the new AI tool than I can with the old search field!

Oh, you mean a useful way, never mind.

Great ways to get buzzwords on your investor slides!

  • I make a point of describing things written conventionally as "not using artificial intelligence, just using good old-fashioned reliable analogue stupidity".