Comment by eco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eco | Hacker News Reader

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I've had two interactions with Wendy's AI drive-through, and the first time I was pleasantly surprised, but the second time it would not stop suggesting add-ons after every single thing I said. It was comically pushy.

A human would have pretty quickly picked up on my increasingly exasperated "no, thanks" and stopped doing it, but the AI was completely blind to my growing frustration, following the upsell directive without any thought.

It reminded me of when I worked in retail as a kid and we were required to ask if they needed any batteries at checkout, even if they were just buying batteries. I learned pretty quickly to ignore that mandate in appropriate situations (unless the manager was around).

Makes me wonder how often employees are smart enough to ignore hard rules mandated by far-off management that would hurt the company's reputation if they were actually followed rigidly. AI isn't going to have that kind of sensitivity to subtle clues in human interaction for some time, I suspect.

It's the speed limit problem.

Everyone who's detached from reality whether an MBA in HQ or some two bit in the internet comment section who fancies themselves a central planner thinks that the problem is the people on the ground not following "the rules" when in reality "the rules", in just about any situation where there are rules are crap if followed and often themselves are knowingly crap written in response to other crap ("government says you need to tell you wear this PPE, no exception, yes we know you'll get heat stroke in some conditions, we're not checking <wink>" type stuff).

So the solution is more AI: to replace c-suit.

That is indeed a great solution that will never happen.

Let's make sure we're living in a somewhat egalitarian society and our systems are aligned with that, shall we?

It most certainly would be a very interesting experiment... Alas, the real powers-be would never let such an experiment off the ground... EVER!

That was my first thought as well. Every customer-facing job has ridiculous requirements from corporate that any employee with half a brain knows to skip. I wonder how much more exasperating customer service experiences will get with the proliferation of language models that don't know how to soft-pedal this stuff.

Big box retail here.

One of my line managers described the corporate management style as "Asking for an unreasonably excessive goal in order to motivate people to work towards a reasonable outcome".

That, and the CYA safety stuff, which corporate orders us to follow but does not in all cases actually expect us to follow; If they did they would have taken their regulations written in blood and asked somebody "How many more people do we need to hire to implement this?" So the management that needs to actually deliver on hard, visible cleanliness & sale-related metrics relaxes enforcement until barely anybody actually knows that the policy exists. Part of their job is to be ritually fired when that goes wrong.

you've hit the nail on the head here. AI rollout has this hilarious consequence where "lower" departments have for a long time insultated the c-suite against their worst excesses and worst mistakes. Now that barrier is slowly crumbling due to AI-first, giving the c-suite an incredibly rare opportunity to discover how bad some of its ideas are in practice and there's less opportunity to blame those outcomes on others.

I am pretty certain that if you are in an org where c-suite shifts reasons for negative results to external sources, they will find a way to do the same in the age of AI.

I've always thought of this as the reality grease problem.

We need rules. Yet the infinite variety of reality creates infinite situations in which the rules are counterproductive.

Previously: the ground folks had a brain and bent/ignored certain rules in the interest of getting their job done.

The principle peril of creating a more end-to-end automated, lights-out business is that there is no longer a brain to grease the interface between c-level and reality.

And c-level is never going to admit their own mistakes.

Ergo, you're going to get a lot of command-heavy companies that plow themselves into the ground over the next 10-20 years, because the low-level people they're going to fire were performing an essential function.

(Note: the easiest escape, inasmuch as I can see one, in radically data-driven management, with frequent random shifts between analogous but independent metrics)

seems they took Dude, Where's My Car as an inspiration?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkdyU_eUm1U

aaaand then?

No and then.

I'm optimistic that the ease of enforcing rules like this and better customer data (maybe via the apps) will lead to a better format. The annoyance grows from the rules causing us to be prompted to do or respond to things we don't want or need. When the taco bell guy asks if I want to add sour cream for the third time, I am getting pretty annoyed. I don't like sour cream, period. But every time they hit me with "would you like to double the chicken", even if I wasn't a yes upon driving to the window, I cave when they ask and both parties are probably happier for it. Management isn't totally wrong here because there are upsells that all of us would take when presented at the right time. It's a bit like ad targeting. Its just happening in realtime at the window.

So the problem in my mind is the format. How do you not ask 3 questions with every dish? Maybe the screens can help. Now that you have an AI that can follow the rules always and likely follow more complex decision trees quickly "at the window", it reasonable chains could start to dial in how this works to be more targeted and active vs passive at the right times.

I wish I was optimistic that data and compliant robots will be used to make things better for customers.

I think it's far more likely that they will, at best, be used to do whatever horrible and unpleasant things that temporarily juice sales numbers. Across our economy we'll see this play out in every customer service interaction. And a wave of perniciously persistent upselling attempts will wash over us all.

After a while, we won't stop noticing that the simple process of buying a soda requires saying no to 15 different requests to subscribe to a service, put our credit card on file, sign up for notifications, and consider buying cookies, a burger, and some fries. But our lives will be worse for it.

I would hope you can actually skip that automatically by ignoring the follow-up and immediately driving off to the next stage.

If it knows what you asked for + sees you drove to the next stage, it should automatically finalize the order.

I’ve always wondered if that battery spiel paid off. Do you have any stats? I never once was at Radio Shack and was like “yeah let me get some of your batteries” when they asked. Maybe I’m a fringe case.

Their battery business was strong even towards the end though, the "even if you're only buying batteries" part of the GP post subtly telling

I'm very curious as to whether it'd listen or it's design even let's it listen to you if you tell it to stop upselling at the onset.

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