Disconnected Room 101: Killing AI Slop, Pointless Apps, and Fake Notifications with Jason Kapadia, Jag Sharma and Jen Campbell #120

And you know what, guys? I'll go first.

All my submissions for Disconnected Room 101 today have the same theme.

Technology should remove friction without removing autonomy.

My first nomination is AI customer service.

Chatbots, automated support agents, and increasingly those AI generated customer service emails that somehow manage to use 400 words without actually answering the question you asked.

Customer service used to mean that when something went wrong, eventually you could explain the situation to another human being who could understand context, exercise judgment, and take responsibility for fixing it.

Now, there's increasingly an AI standing between you and that person.

You explain the problem, it misunderstands you.

You explain it differently, it tells you it's sorry to hear that.

You ask to speak to a human, and it says, before I connect you, could you briefly describe your problem? I just did, three times.

And email is going the same way.

We're approaching a world where I use AI to write my complaint, the company uses AI to summarize it, another AI generates the response, and absolutely nobody involved has actually read anything.

So AI can help customer service teams all it likes.

But the moment it becomes a barrier between me and someone capable of actually solving my problem, that is the issue.

And that is my first submission into disconnected Room 101 AI customer service.

Get it in Room 101.

Thank you very much, Jen Campbell.

You know what I find so annoying about these AI bots is the fake empathy that they give.

It's like it's charged you 500 dirhams or dollars or whatever extra.

And then you say like, you double charge me this much.

And then the bot responds, I'm so sorry to hear that.

I understand how stressful financial situations can be.

Let's get this sorted.

It's so annoying.

And it feels, you know you're talking to a bot.