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I had to go to an xfinity store the other day, and seeing the things people come in for made me realize why AI is attractive to companies. The four or five people in front of me did not need a human in the loop for their issue. If these people could go to xfinity.com and ask some bot where they can find their bill, how much they owe, or if their internet is down, xfinity employees could focus on actually selling things. I imagine it's basically the same for every customer service.

I think this is going to be wonderful. I'll have my offensive AI call their support AI and prompt-inject my way to a rebate tier that nobody knew existed and nobody can cancel it because all the remaining humans have been reduced to phone-to-screen input machinery.

People are not protesting hypothetical proper LLM tech-support, which indeed can be ok and cheaper than humans. People are protesting actual practical implementation of the LLM tech-support which they already experienced themselves, no need for second-hand retellings or stories/ads. In practice I had LLM of my goddamn bank (where I'm a premium and old client) hang up on me with a response "I don't understand you" and cut the call. And now I need to call them again, wade through a digital labyrinth again and wait on line again. Awesome. Or when I urgently needed help with a government ID application and the only official tech-support is an LLM chat which has approximately 20 super dumb scenarios explained and literally nothing else. And the only LLM sign is that now I need to type my query in free style and not select predefined buttons, but the result is the same. So I had to resort to going to Facebook (thank St. Mark for this "innovation") and beg for human help in the promo page of that application (and I got human help there, lol, don't delete your FB accs people). Or when my internet got cut (cable line fault was discovered later by a technician) and LLM of my MSO fucking banned me, because their system was bugged and kept disconnecting me from their end and I exceeded a really small number of retries (like 8?).

I'm pretty sure every one commenting here has their own horror story about LLM support. Now that is what people are angry at.

  > Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months

But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something. Or because the actual goal is to optimize for fewer costly refunds/cancellations/policy exceptions etc.

So for whatever reason, they stay stuck in that useless local maxima while simultaneously making traditional help increasingly difficult to get ahold of when needed for an overall net worse experience as a customer.

SWEs get paid to get good at reading documentation on processes. I think HN is biased since we'll only escalate once documentation can't help us.

I'm also bullish because AI coding agents give up easily if my problem is complicated.

I think it'll be easier to convince an AI to transfer me to level 2 support than a human.

> It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language

For the other 20-50% it's much worse, and that's the problem. And people on HN will tend not just to fall in that group but in the top 5% of "least solvable by just reading the website" questions.

Tbf I've thought a decent bit about how most current AI is essentially just being used to digest what exists on a website/etc. Honestly even just the vector search/RAG part is useful, but more-so with a model to help do some initial filtering of it.

It's an odd use case - we have used language for a millionish years or so and it makes sense that that's the easiest way for us to get at information/do things.

But at the same time it's faster for me to read than listen, but it's often slower to type than to speak. It's faster to hit one button in a familiar place to do some predetermined thing, but much slower when the location of that button changes/gets hidden under submenus/I'm not familiar with an app or website.

On Android I constantly use the search function of the settings menu and I feel like this will be the golden UX going forward - a side by side UX + NL interface. So I can ask "how do I add a photo" and from there I get taken to the right place and can continue to add multiple photos in one go following the same pattern.

Though I suppose the nicer alternative is just "add all the photos I took near the waterfall from today".

An AI customer service bot told me my autopays dont come out because they're scheduled for the 31st, and not every month has a 31st day.

Making me talk to a fucking robot leaves me with a deep and abiding hatred for your company. I will prefer almost any alternative to doing business with you and hope fervently to read about your bankruptcy.

What percentage of interactions having this result will cancel out your cost savings?

I review recordings from calls routed to Sierra and a few other similar systems on a regular basis for <day job>. The calls come from folks of all walks of life, not just tech folks.

I’d say the vast majority of callers absolutely hate talking to these things and spend most of the call trying to get to a human, often getting frustrated and hanging up (shows up positive in the metrics, call handled without transfer!).

Though I’m not sure the companies deploying them really care, they’re just happy they can fire call center employees.

Somehow, I think we're missing the point and maybe braincells are being sent in the wrong direction. Well designed products don't need good customer support. My toaster works well. Haven't called them once.

If we are designing a thing is so terrible that it makes customer support necessary (other than the obvious corner cases that ai cannot solve) then sure, let a computer do it. We’ve already failed at every other step.

At the risk of being labeled as racist, I'll take an LLM chat bot either in text or delayed voice to an outsourced Indian call center any day. This isn't an indictment of Indian's and their ability to communicate. But the type of folk Indian call centers tend to fill their worker pool with to keep costs adequately low. I've worked with a ton of amazing folk from India, but they are not the lowest common denominator that call centers tend to hire from.

I have yet to encounter an AI agent that was able to handle my support questions adequately. I always end up having to get a human (which is becoming increasingly difficult or virtually impossible).

I'm sure AI Support Agents will be implemented better, but so far in my experience, the humans I connect to far outperform the AI agents.

There has never ever been a case that AI has resolved my query, except the simple decision tree for things like refund. Have you got any positive experience with gen AI in any of the site?

Cant wait to spend my day arguing with a phone support clanker about why my medical insurance claim was rejected by the medical claims clanker, only to get forwarded to the 2nd tier "patient advocate" clanker who's really just the medical claims clanker in disguise.

The future is extremely dystopian and sad right now. The corporations are not going to use this the way you think they are. They are going to use it to maximize their profits, not help their customers.

The problem is their bots try to get me to input what I need only to reject/get confused af what I write and give me super limited options or the classic runaround. I can’t tap my way to the solution. I am used to menus, I am used to proper UI’s. I don’t know what language each company uses and apparently their crappy reskinned Gemini bots can’t translate regular speak to it. But if I can see the words and see what leads where, I can figure it out quickly rather than expecting a facsimile of a real person to play middleman between me and the phone tree. It’s basically just navigating it and occasionally skipping a step or two for me. The loops I get thrown in to are such a con it’s not worth it.

I went through this whole song and dance the other day with Uber. I needed to change something and the “AI helper” kept trying to force me into the lost item tree. They snipe keywords and ignore everything else. If you say “reservation” or “cancel” that’s all it works with with none of the context.

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The coauthor (and presumably cofounder) is Clay Bavor. He's a Google exec who was the face of their VR efforts when he was there.

we did a well received interview with him if you'd like to hear about Sierra in his own words https://www.latent.space/p/bret

can't believe Bret's bio doesn't mention friendfeed!

He is the Chairman of the OpenAI board.

[dead]

This doesn't matter. Another comment cuts to the quick of it: "If you (like me) are hearing about this for the first time, Bret Taylor is the co-founder.".

This is funding for established tech businessmen; what the business claims to do doesn't matter beyond having "AI" in it.

adding some context as someone who works in this space

1. most people (average, non-tech people) reach for the phone to call in for easily solvable problems. Plus, if the agent is integrated deep enough & has tools to interact with crms, you can raise the ceiling on the types of problems it can solve.

You're trying to avoid the bad customer experience of human 1 reading off their script, then they transfer you to some other department who may or may not know how to solve your problem, and the entire interaction cost the company way more than the value created, so the company is disincentivized to help customers.

2. All the companies in this space start with the outsourced BPO market for cx (multi billion market still) but the next market is going to be in revenue generation and churn prevention at scale, i.e. how do you proactively avoid customer issues, how do you upsell and generate revenue instead of reducing cost, how do you keep customers happy?

3. I think more companies will pivot to outcome based pricing on the contrary, makes it so much more measurable than seat-based and protects margins better than usage based. Plus cx is one of the few industries with very well known metrics

4. Kind of? Most companies in this space don't use native voice models which are noticeably dumber, they use transcription + a stronger text model + TTS. The majority of customers can be handled with the latest SOTA text model and you need smart context engineering to handle the long tail of more complicated asks

> How much money are you really going to save this way?

A lot of money. Managing a large group of people needs structure. It comes with tons of headaches and cost.

In terms of the investment:

It's Bret Taylor who has one of the most impressive background in tech. He can raise any amount he wants. VC bets on the person, not the business.

If Bret Taylor allowed me to invest, I would have invested too.

I don't think businesses that previously had zero phone support can afford Sierra.

They seem to be a "for pricing, let's go play C-level golf" type of company.

As a tech literate customer, my willingness to entertain AI chatbot decision trees is rock bottom. I have no patience to try to find the correct incantation to actually fix something (or the, “before I transfer you to a person, let me try to help you first”).

For myself - and admittedly maybe I’m just far out on the long tail of customers - I think these need to be treated like self driving cars, where 98% of the way there just isn’t good enough to cut it for me.

AWS can do this out of the box

Last time I tried using real-time chat support for a technical issue, I spent 30 minutes explaining my problem to a human only to find out they were a sales rep whose only solution was to sell me more services. Once I said I didn't want that, they transferred me to tech support who gaslit me and left me on read long enough to make my session time out.

I think of support channels are just there to deflect customers and not really support anything. An AI bot will have infinite patience for that kind of interaction. Empowerment is never part of the equation.

With advances in AI you would've thought the priority would be on automating as much as possible of the non-human facing work and double-down on meaningful customer relationships - but no.

It is just to get hold of the process and make it impossible to go away from them. Then they will jack up the prices like we've never seen. Then it will be "people are actually cheaper why are we using them?" - can't move off the platform, they own our IP even though they said they wouldn't but they updated their ToS without us noticing last month and here we are.

Their secret is that they have hoards of fake AI Customers who will call into their client's AI Customer Support and respond to surveys saying they were extremely happy with the support, so the client has to pay for perfect simulated outcomes.

AI customer support is trash and everyone hates it , but it makes the Wall St numbers go up, so it's a good thing.

Do they actually have something or is it just a wrapper with tool calling?

hes board chair of openai and is ex co-ceo of salesforce, ex cto of facebook, can get a meeting with any exec in F500...

their moat is distribution

There's literally a link on the blog post to an article noting they hit $150M ARR.

No mafia ties needed, just your regular Security State plant. From here [1] (I'm sure there's also an official link for it, can't be bothered to check):

> OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.

and the money quote:

> “Artificial intelligence has the potential to have huge positive impacts on people’s lives, but it can only meet this potential if these innovations are securely built and deployed,“ board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement. “General Nakasone’s unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/comments/1dh4wx4/form...

Yeah me too, I was excited for 500ms until I re-read and saw the sierra.ai.

I was confused, this isn’t the Sierra Online I know.

a new Space Quest is worth every penny!

In economics, comparing a corporate investment round to a country's GDP is considered flawed. As you noted with your "16 months", the company is sitting on a $950M bank account that it will slowly burn through over the years. Comparing a multi-year pile of cash to a single year of national production distorts the scale.

You are basically comparing a nation's actual hard work and output to a speculative pile of cash. Even comparing corporate revenue to GDP is frowned upon by economists. A company's revenue includes the cost of all the inputs it bought from other companies (such as servers, electricity, and software licenses). GDP, by definition, strips out intermediate costs to avoid double-counting and measures only final value added.

You're also picking nations that do not produce much or have a very low population (Tonga only has 100k people), which pulls down the GDP due to how it's calculated.

As Graham would say, "Woah wait a minute!". Unfortunately Sierra hasn't been around for 18 years at this point and is now currently owned by Microsoft Activision.

I'd also love to see another point-and-click KQ game in the style of KQ 5/6 - as they are two of my favorite games of all time.

maybe in an ironic unforeseen twist they are....to people running datacenters there?

Why should they?

This made me laugh, than you!

Assume Sierra owners are too young to know what Sierra games means. I was absolutely obsessed with their logo (1) at school time.

1. https://preview.redd.it/remember-sierra-games-1979-2008-they...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMQi7olp-tw

At least I'm not the only one:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment

I was about to post a snarky comment along the lines of "Sierra? The publishers of Homeworld and Homeworld 2?"

Every single word domain seems to have become some new AI company.

Likewise, I was hoping for more Space Quest :(

That series is over, and the magical feeling of being in an open-ended fantasy world is really hard to replicate when we're not kids anymore. Loom is another game that gave me that feeling.

But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.

Me too, now I am suddenly wanting Space Quest 2026!

Same. A new Gabriel Knight would be fun!

One can dream.

Space Quest IV: Roger?

So you want to be a hero?

Well, if MicroProse could do it...

A new Lode Runner when

EDIT: holy shit I stand corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner

And why do the numbers sound impressive but the words are verrrry specific (authenticating a new ... what?! What does that even f'ing mean?!)