The weirdest thing happened to me recently. I contacted a customer service department and enjoyed it. I sent an email, heard back promptly, and got a refund. What was most notable about the positive problem-solving experience was the fact that I couldn’t tell if there was a human other than me involved.

It dawned on me, however briefly, that the prophecies were finally coming true. AI was finally making it easier for me to complain to companies and get results. At least that’s what I wanted to believe.

Customer service is supposed to be one of those things that AI can just do. Indeed, that one good experience was powered by an AI-first company called Intercom. They have an AI agent called Fin that handles most of its clients’ queries. Why not all of them?

“I’m confident that a lot of current customer support that happens over a phone or computer, those people will lose their jobs, and that’ll be better done by an AI,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Tucker Carlson, of all people, in September.

Altman is hardly the only Silicon Valley executive pushing to automate customer service. Last year, Salesforce cut 4,000 customer service jobs in favor of AI tools, and Verizon launched a chatbot powered by Google Gemini as its front door for customer service. Then there’s Klarna, whose CEO bragged about replacing humans with AI before backtracking last May and launching a recruiting drive to hire more human customer service agents.

There’s the rub. It turns out that AI, and especially generative AI, is really good at doing some things…until it isn’t. That’s why you still have to fact-check everything ChatGPT tells you and why, even though........

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