Hacker News Reader

Comment by drewnick | Hacker News Reader

I have deepseek agents doing email responses, with real tools (think running quotes, gathering info, scheduling things) and running business processes that used to be done by $35/hr administrative type people. And the capabilities are expanding every day as I learn how to build scaffolding around the model.

View on HN

> I have deepseek agents doing email responses

So, spam?

Not all communications done by a non-human is necessarily spam.

Spam is unsolicited, unwanted email.

If someone is asking you for a quote, and your tool replies, it's not spam.

It might be slop for all I know (or might not be!), but it's not spam.

Similarly for arranging meetings with parties that you already have a relationship with.

I am a tech lead for a useful but non-essential PaaS my company subscribes to. Their product manager occasionally sends me clearly AI-authored emails. I ignore them. I am a believer in the usefulness of AI, but nothing says I don’t care more clearly than sending me slop.

I can’t overstate how bad of an idea I think using an AI for customer interaction is.

I think it depends on the industry. In my company (insurtech) a large percentage of our sales come from AI engagements (phone and text). The customers know they're talking to an AI and they can elect to talk to a human at any time but many times they don't.

But yeah, send me a non solicited AI slop email or worse, political ad, and you dont get the dignity of me saying stop to unsubscribe. Straight to spam for you.

People have been trained to "press or say" a number while going through an AI voice menu on phones for over a decade. So a chatbot looks great by comparison in that context.

I wonder if various companies have recordings of me screaming "OPERATOR!!!!" or pressing 0000000000 ****

Optimum is probably using a middle ground: Use AI to do all preparations like suggesting quotes, gathering background about the customers query etc but then have the human write the email for personal touch. Still much faster than doing it all by hand.

You have an AI handing out potentially legally binding quotes for you??

Reply on news.ycombinator.com