The Concentrated Economics of AI: Why Cloud Hyperscalers May Be Undervalued

After I get the quote, I call back and get a phone AI assistant instead to handle scheduling the job instead of the human secretary. The AI assistant does not understand my home address and keeps asking me over and over to repeat myself. It was never able to get unstuck. There was no option to speak to a person, so I hung up without getting the job scheduled. I wrote a bad Google review detailing my experience. I called a different plumbing company (with a human on the other end) and got a second quote that was 30% less than the original, they came out and did the job.

Three weeks later, the owner of the first company reaches out making excuses as to why he wasn't flagged about my issue sooner and apologizing, but the job was done by that point. I'd rather pay extra for services like plumbing if it means I can talk to a human because these LLM voice systems can't do basic scheduling calls.

People can wax poetic about the impending value transfer of these systems but I have yet to personally experience an AI integration in the wild that gives me confidence that these systems are ready to do human jobs. After my experience, I refuse to do business with companies that use frontline AI for communication because it’s just not worth it.