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170 points bookofjoe | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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lenerdenator ◴[] No.43644555[source]
> One wonders what Asimov would make of the world of 2025, and whether he’d still see artificial and natural intelligence as complementary, rather than in competition.

I mean, I just got done watching a presentation at Google Next where the presenter talked to an AI agent and set up a landscaping appointment with price match and a person could intervene to approve the price match.

It's cool, sure, but understand, that agent would absolutely have been a person on a phone five years ago, and if you replace them with agentic AI, that doesn't mean that person has gone away or is now free to write poetry. It means they're out of an income and benefits. And that's before you consider the effects on the pool of talent you're drawing from when you're looking for someone to intervene on behalf of these agentic AIs, like that supervisor did when they approved the price match. If you don't have the entry-level person, you don't have them five years later when you want to promote someone to manage.

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1. Spooky23 ◴[] No.43644779[source]
Not necessarily. The reality is the landscaping guy is struggling to handle callbacks or is burning overhead. Even then, two girls in the office hits a ceiling where it doesn’t scale quickly, now you’re in a call center scenario.

Call center based services always suck. I remember going to a talk where American Express, who operated best in class call centers, found that 75% of their customers don’t want to talk to them. The people are there because that’s needed for a complex relationship, the more stuff you can address earlier in the funnel, the better.

Customers don’t want to talk to you, and ultimately serving the customer is the point.