Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans.

So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes.

I'm currently dealing with a months-long banking error where the bank has incorrectly linked my credit card account to my wife's account and/or an account of mine in a different region, so it variously doesn't show up in my online account, shows the wrong number, shows the purchases from the wrong account, etc.

Every time I call in in a 5-minute rigamarole of:

"Please describe what you're calling about."

"Representative."

"In order to connect to a representative, please describe what you're calling about."

"There's an error with my account."

"Would you like to know your account balance?"

"No, my credit card account is not correctly configured and isn't showing up in my online banking account."

"I didn't understand. Please describe what you're calling about."

Eventually the bot reaches some failure state and then allows me to wait on hold for an hour to talk to an actual rep.

When I eventually get to talk to a rep, I get "Yes, I see that your account isn't correctly configured, I'll submit a back-end ticket and it should get fixed within 5-10 business days."

The next week I check my online banking, my credit card still isn't showing up, and I call and repeat the entire process.

So yes, it's not AI that's directly causing this Kafkaesque nightmare, but it's AI that's empowered the leaders at every utility/retailer/bank/insurer/etc. that I deal with turn their support systems into this slop.

Anecdotal evidence to support this - on a much less important platform.

We have two cars from our local car dealership. When we first set up the account, we did it through what I assumed were some kind of AI voice prompts. First time we take my wifes car in? I'm getting the calls from the dealership about whats wrong. Then I start getting texts telling me the car is ready. Same thing with her, but she's getting all the calls and notifications when we take my car in.

This has gone on for THREE YEARS. Last year we just gave up after telling people in person and going online and changing it several times. It did work for one visit, then reverted right back to mixing them up.

This isn't nearly as important as your banking issues, but its in a completely different industry and the experience is nearly identical.

That's been my observation of AI customer support. They're pretty much all glorified FAQ reciters unable to handle any unusual or uncommon situation not in the FAQs.

The one AI customer support experience I’ve actually enjoyed was last winter in a cold snap when my pipes froze. Drove to a Walmart to find a space heater and of course they were sold out. Called my local Lowe’s, got an AI agent, asked if any space heaters were in stock, it told me the one model left and the aisle to find it. Drove there and got what I needed without a fuss.

That’s the exception of course, literally every other time I’ve had to deal with an AI agent it can’t deal with the slightest deviation from its assumptions. Most of the time I call support, it’s because I already tried the automated options and they didn’t work for me. The fuzzy, nonstandard situations AI customer support agents suck are the one thing customer support is most needed for. I would’ve just used the website to check space heaters in stock if I hadn’t been driving.

I had a mixed incredible/horrible experience with Claude's AI support agent. First, I suspected there was a particular problem with the API access, and I articulated it and said, "can you give me a way to test this theory and prove that the problem is on your end? Python is acceptable" and it spit out a python test program that proved the problem was on their end. Then it turned a corner and spent 30 minutes insisting that it was going to connect me with a real person who could fix the problem for me before finally admitting that the whole thing was a boondoggle and it had no way to connect me with an actual person, but maybe I should come back to the chat in a day or two and see if anyone noticed and responded.

The real interesting thing was that early on in that 30 minutes, it gave me very clear instructions about how to get a live agent (including a quoted trigger phrase like "I would like to speak to a live agent" or something), which made me believe it was possible, which ultimately made me resist the slow realization that that was a complete fabrication. It was a very effective way to waste my time.

With that experience, why have you stayed with that provider? It would seem to be no harder, and quite satisfying, to open new accounts with another provider for you and your wife, and then cancel these accounts.

Basically every provider seems to have a similar level of customer support.

For banking in particular, I already bank with a half-dozen banks because they have different products/services that are optimal for some specific use cases (i.e. I min-max my bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts.) — however, customer support seems to be universally bad.

If you're curious about why I'm using that particular bank, I'm forced to use them for some investment accounts because my employer matching benefits uses them. For the credit card, they're one of the few banks that offer proper co-applicants (rather than just supplemental users) which really works best for the way my wife and I have our finances organized. And flights in my city are dominated by a single airline where the only way to avoid paying for baggage is to get the co-branded credit card from this bank.

Cancelling a long term credit car can profoundly effect ones credit score sadly.

Right, of the faster/better/cheaper triad, these things are overwhelmingly being implemented towards cheaper, and the idea that owners can gut the support structure for errors and edge-cases.

I realize quoting Doctorow on this is... rather low-hanging fruit for this topic, but I like how this scenario suggests the AI company makes more money when the implementation is hostile to the consumer:

> We’ve heard some pretty credible stuff about how AI can be used to spot solid mass tumors that sometimes humans miss. And, you know, if there was a sales call right now at your local hospital, where there was a pitchman for an AI company telling the hospital administrator, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Right now you have 10 radiologists. They cost $3 million a year. They review a hundred X-rays a day each. And I tell you what: I’m going to sell you a chatbot for a million bucks a year. And it’s going to sit in the shadows, and a couple of times a day, it’s going to tap your radiologist on the shoulder and say, 'Why don't you take another look at that one? I’d be very happy,’” that would seem like a real advance on medicine. But that’s not how the pitch is going.

> [...] But what the AI companies want to sell you is: fire nine-tenths of your radiologists, save $2.7 million a year, split that between the hospital shareholders and Sam Altman, take that remaining radiologist and put them in charge of marking the AI’s homework, put them in charge of clicking OK a hundred times a minute for the radiology reports that are coming out of the chatbot, and then, when it misses something and someone dies, blame that guy, make him what Dan Davies calls the “accountability sink” for the AI.

-- https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/25/reverse_centaur_docto...

I actually made another comment about lack of leadership causing many issues including exhausting dev teams.

What you describe is an execution failure not AI, these are basic NLP systems that could be easily configured with some dataset to make them better, but i will make a wild guess that the bank has incompetent manager who was pushing for some numbers to put in a slide to say “I” did this.

The parent commenter's experience pretty much sums up my experience with every IVR system, AI or not. The IVR cannot do anything I can't do on the website or the app. I wouldn't be calling if I could get the job done without calling them, so my experience is simply that the IVR is simply an obstacle to talking to a human. Very often the first human I talk to is simply an obstacle to talking to the second human, because the first human is so limited in their knowledge and authority that they can't do anything I can't do with the website or app either.

I don't really think this is an implementation problem or incompetence. AI is just not reliable enough yet to deal with long tail situations, especially in cases where the most common procedures don't apply. You can't give it the authority to override common-case business rules or make financially consequential decisions, because it will be manipulated/prompt injected by fraudsters.

I suspect a lot of big orgs don’t care if they lose high-need/low-margin/negative-margin clients that need a couple chains of humans to fix their issue.

If they were otherwise high profit customers, they wouldn’t/shouldn’t have put them into IVR hell in the first place.

Anywho, I’m off to acquiring a DID that suggests I’m from a high-net-worth area. Until then, I’ll forge my caller id.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com