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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising to me at how hard companies are pushing AI when it's in such a poor usability state.

I was trying to sign up my step dad to SiriusXM (he wanted it) so I called their phone number. The first interaction with the company is them saying you are speaking to an AI and to ask what I'm trying to do. So I said something like "I'd like to sign up for a new account but have a question about the promotional price". It said it couldn't understand the request and I had to repeat things a few times until it gave up and sent me to a human where the question was resolved quickly but it took minutes to reach a human.

It's wild to me that companies are putting AI at the top of their sales funnel.

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This sounds like the same basic voice systems we’ve had for 15 years. Idk if that counts as modern “AI”

The modern AI phone support systems I’ve encountered aren’t able to do anything or go off script, so it sounds better but it’s still a lousy experience.

I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call. Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

Or the decision maker put "replaced 50% of call workers with AI" on their resume and got a new job instead of measuring the results.

> I'd bet there's some calculation that people who try to sign up for a plan over the phone end up using the phone more down the line, which would mean more costly operator time. So the math works out where the overall savings of making enough people give up before reaching a human outweighs the cost of potentially lost new subscriptions by phone call.

That's an example of a weird heuristic I frequently see applied to corporations: assume some awful decision is the result of some scarily hyper-competent design process, and construct a speculative explanation along those lines.

But must of us have worked in corporations, an know how stupid and incompetent they can be.

> Or, they just didn't study that. Or, the decision-makers don't contact customer support for themselves and so don't know how infuriatingly unhelpful AI ones are.

Occam's razor points to this as the reason.

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