To be fair, it is useful in some regards.

I’m not a huge fan of Amazon, but last time I had an issue with a parcel it was sorted out insanely fast by the AI assistant on the website.

Within literally 2 minutes I’d had a refund confirmed. No waiting for people to eventually pick up the phone after 40 minutes. No misunderstanding or annoying questions. The truncated version went:

“Hey I meant to get [x] delivery, but it hasn’t arrived. Can I get a refund?”

“Sure, your money will go back into [y] account in a few days. If the parcel turns up in the meantime, you can send it back by dropping it off at [z]”

Done. Absolutely painless.

That has nothing to do with AI and is strictly a return policy matter. You can get a return in less than 2 minutes by speaking to a human at Home Depot.

Businesses choose to either prioritize customer experience, or not.

There’s a big claim from Klarna - that I am not aware has been independently verified – that customers prefer their bot.

The cynic might say they were probably undertraining a skeleton crew of underpaid support reps. More optimistically, perhaps so many support inquiries are so simple that responding to them with a technology that can type a million words per minute should obviously be likely to increase customer satisfaction.

Personally, I’m happy with environmentally-acceptable and efficient technologies that respect consumers… assuming they are deployed in a world with robust social safety nets like universal basic income. Heh