Mostly this leaves me concerned about an escalating war between companies intentionally introducing friction into their customer service pipelines to discourage expensive customer behavior, and customers increasingly relying on more and more AI automation to deal with that friction.

In a perfect world this would cause the intentional friction to be less and less effective, while laws and regulations stop the companies from implementing more and more aggressive policies/systems, leading them to go back to the fastest possible pipeline to capture those savings if nothing else.

But I am worried that is not the world we live in and I am going to try to return some shoes I bought in the wrong size and be asked to do some integrals before I am allowed to.