Ten years ago, the YouTuber CGP Grey posted the video Humans Need Not Apply. It’s a bit dated today, but still worth watching.
I’m here today, with a few year’s hindsight using the new AI customer support assistants, to reassure humans that they do indeed need to continue applying.
I am on a vacation trip and I usually decide where I will spend the night during the afternoon before the stop. I tend to wander while driving and can’t predict exactly where I’ll be at the end of the day. So I use hotels.com to scout out hotels an hour or two ahead of me in the afternoon. My room is waiting for me when I get there. This has worked for me for years now, and it suits my travel habits well.
Yesterday, it didn’t.
I booked a room through hotels.com at a Best Western, and when I arrived at the hotel, there was no reservation to be found. By the way, the Best Western human, named Karen, was very helpful, but this was not a Best Western problem.
I returned to the hotels.com app and could see that the reservation, while confirmed, was somehow hung up somewhere in their system. I assume an AI was still working on it somewhere. So I invoked the AI support assistant. I wish I had captured the chat session, but let’s just say that the AI couldn’t grasp what the problem was, but happily sent me a copy of my receipt, which I already had in the app and in my email. I told it I needed a human agent, which it was able to do after a fifteen minute delay and without forwarding any information to the human, Kaushal.
After I gave Kaushal my confirmation number, he immediately grasped the problem and said he would call the hotel and get back to me in 4 to 5 minutes. Seconds later, I heard Karen’s phone ring at the desk. I overheard Karen’s conversation as the two humans fixed the problem. When Kaushal returned to the chat session a minute later, Karen was checking me into the hotel.
I hope and pray that Kaushal and Karen do not fall prey to the AIs that think they can take their jobs.