Don't get lost in the customer service example. Focus on the idea instead which can be applied to many other professions.

People thought AI being better than a human at reading medical images would put radiologists out of a job. But instead, radiologists had more demand than ever because it made getting a scan more affordable, more accurate which led to more customer demand.

Same can happen for customer service. AI makes customer service cheaper, better, faster. More companies offer good customer service in order to stay competitive. More customers demand customer service because it's better now and they expect it since all companies big or small can afford quality customer service.

I run a small SaaS business that both sells a super niche AI product to a non-technical audience of small businesses, and also is built and run by AIs, managed by me. I'm the only human in the mix.

I do all the sales and customer service myself, because it's a genuine selling point for my customers that they can talk to the owner if they have issues, and because these customers are the lifeblood of my company, and I want to stay as close to them and their needs as I can.

But it's still time-consuming.

On the customer service side, my next crack at automation will just be having an agent triage inbound requests, queuing up the actions that need to be taken in response (cancel account, upgrade, split team, whatever), and then giving me the whole thing for approval and replying to customer. That alone should easily cut my time spent on CS by 80%, while keeping a more personal touch. I should also note that some of the customer support burden will be lifted by having more self-serve options to do things, better docs, etc. But given that my customers are non-technical, there are always going to be some of them that just want to dash off a text or email because they hate tech and don't want to hassle with it.

On the sales side, I've thus far been 100% sales driven, but I'd like to introduce a self-serve signup flow that targets the 80% of customers who have simpler needs and could probably sign up on their own, and save the sales calls for bigger or more complicated deals.

AI needn't respond, it can instead be used to sort the meaningless noise from the actionable complaints, where previously all would have been ignored. Raise only the issues that matter and can be addressed to the human.

You sure could let the agent try to do the task and supervise it before sending of replies to customers. Similar to as to that I still check the code produced by an agent.

If you remove the human from the loop in customer service, you won't gain a thing.

Spot on! I hate being sucked into an "accountability sink", where delay/bad treatment/ tangential answers are ok (somehow acceptable) and justified because it's not personal, "it's just the process".