The friction of the phone call was a feature, not a bug, from the service provider's perspective. They wanted to make it harder to cancel the service for obvious reasons. They wanted to make it harder to book a table (so you'd be less likely to no-show). It's 2023, there really aren't that many businesses left that don't have basic functionality online out of sheer incompetence. It's a deliberate, willful choice, seldom in the consumer's favor, and I'm all for disrupting the hell out of this. I'd rather waste compute cycles on this nonsense than human beings' time.

Maybe in the not so distant future, the AI agents can have a shibboleth which cuts the human gobbledygook short, and reverts to speaking in dialup tones.