alt Hacker NewsThis is expected. A lot of these companies that are closing their doors make a large portion of their revenue based off of ads and upsells which agents can easily be instructed to ignore, and don't interact with like a human.
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
Yes, same with many other things where people were under informed or did t have the time to look out for their own interests. Such as filing complaints, citing the correct legal sections, knowing the procedures, knowing their rights, noticing when they are getting an unfair deal, etc etc.
I do see that there is another side to this. I saw complaints by an event organizer (think weddings etc) who got some special requests and went above and beyond to accommodate but it turns out the extensive requests likely were AI generated fully optimizing for the customer's interests, and just shamelessly asking for many favors essentially. She used to do these things because humans had a bit of embarrassment and friction around asking too many things and so it worked on a social agreement that if you ask it likely is truly important that you made the effort to ask. Now this cannot be assumed. So things will more to more formal rules, more explicit pricing for the small asks, and generally more adversarial and low trust systems that fully squeeze out the human slack from these systems.