As a tech literate customer, my willingness to entertain AI chatbot decision trees is rock bottom. I have no patience to try to find the correct incantation to actually fix something (or the, “before I transfer you to a person, let me try to help you first”).
For myself - and admittedly maybe I’m just far out on the long tail of customers - I think these need to be treated like self driving cars, where 98% of the way there just isn’t good enough to cut it for me.
An AI chatbot is orders of magnitude better to get the answer "you cannot be helped" than wading through every possibility in a phone tree.
This is my feeling 100%. If I'm on the phone, it's as a last resort because all the other prescribed pathways have failed.