Hear me out: what if a lot of the hype they are selling you is performative marketing that they absolutely need your C-suite to believe so they can cut more headcount? Then spend a bunch of time generating piles of code that is human unmaintainable because now you're using AI code reviewers, AI testers, AI QA. Then thrash around using more tokens when it invariably causes production issues and no one can read the code anymore except for their latest and greatest models with 1m context window.

Those are already automated by making your first question "Did you plug it in?", followed by "Did you actually plug it in?". Or industry equivalent. It's not like there wasn't any research into this in the past century.

Clearly they have sales and other teams as the important people within the company, with customer services being down the pecking order.

They don't need AI to automate their customer service requests, they just need decent forms with a standard issue helpdesk system. It takes some work to get right, but anyone with experience of building customer support services will be able to do that, to put most of the customer service team out of work!!!

The problem is that the Law of The Instrument applies:

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

So we have some AI 'hammer' going on here, and it is the wrong tool.

At a guess, 80% of the customer service requests are going to be billing related, with some need to provide refunds or free credits. Get the form right so it shows the right boxes and these 'easy wins' can show up as a big list that a customer service person has to glance over before hitting the 'refund everyone' button. You need the human there to take responsibility, plus they can work on the 20% of other tickets, once they have spent ten minutes clearing down the refunds/extra credits requests.

Google don't sell much to end customers, therefore no support. If I search Google for how to remove fonts from my computer that are not latin, and their AI bot gives me an answer that zaps my whole computer, I can't complain and ask for a refund because I never paid anything in the first place. Google do not need to speak to a single customer.

Meanwhile, Arsthropic have a commercial product with billing. They prefer not to do customer service, but they are stupid. Every contact with customers and friendly customer service is an opportunity to sell more to customers or to not have them hate you. This is why companies should do customer service, however, they also need to put CS at the heart of the org chart and acknowledge that a well run CS department raises revenue and is not a cost.