I been noticing more smarter AI in customer service these days.

A recent example: I docked my BIXI but the thing glitched and the ride didn't terminate. I only realized when I tried to get my next bike out.

In the past when this happened to me, I just called up BIXI support, went through a short phone menu, and explained the situation to someone on the phone. They verified my identity and manually terminated the ride so I could go on my way.

Basically, the ideal phone-based customer support experience. The wait wasn't long, the procedure was efficient, each step made sense, and it solved my problem.

This time, the app prompted me to ask for support via "chat" first. Historically, this could have meant all sorts of things: a naive keyword recognition program that would recommend FAQ entries to me; a tech support worker from a country with a low median wage pasting in responses from a script, 5 tickets at a time; occasionally, the type of person I'd been talking to on the phone, but over text.

This time, it was some sort of LLM. It dynamically and patiently walked me through the identification and triage process. It handled my typos and information I sent bit-by-bit.

Eventually, it concluded the issue needed human involvement. Presumably at the end of its instructions it has a "If asking the customer to jiggle the bike doesn't fix the problem, request that they phone a human." part of its prompt.

This was fine. The trouble was that I then had to do all the same stuff with the human. The same identification process, the same identification of the nearest street intersection, the same bike jiggling. Finally, the human terminated my ride.

It would clearly be better if I could call the human and have them say "I see you've already gone through all the steps with our AI. I'm going to unlock the bike now."

Better yet (though not something BIXI alone can implement), identifying myself is done via a two-factor prompt on my phone (get on this, governments!) and I can use text-to-speech to compose my messages to the AI. Maybe we'll even eventually find them reliable enough to let LLMs terminate rides themselves!

As it currently stands, the experience feels like costs are being cut. It doesn't need to. Automated customer support could actually be faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the best phone support I've had. It's just a matter of a few more improvements to the implementation and integration.

I'm still somewhat skeptical of this future. The companies that have already automated as much of their customer support as humanly possible are miserable to deal with, even though in a sense I'm grateful for the downward pressure they put on prices. These are typically companies of enormous scale. The startups and BIXIs of the world might be able to take a different path.