I feel like that ship sailed long ago with phone trees and hour-long support wait times becoming normal. Not that it's an ideal state of affairs, but I'd much rather talk to a chatbot than wait for an hour for a human who doesn't want to talk to anyone, as long as that chatbot is empowered to solve my problem.
Yeah as long as the chatbot is empowered to fix a bunch of basic problems I'm okay with them as the first line of support. The way support is setup nowadays humans are basically forced to be robots anyway, given a set of canned responses for each scenario and almost no latitude of their own. At least the robot responds instantly.
Have you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me.
As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it.
Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?