alt Hacker NewsWe're not seeing full automation for things that ought to be automatable now. Customer service chatbots still aren't very good. Salesforce ought to be taking over entire marketing operations, not just supporting sales but replacing it. The medical office side of insurance ought to be automatic now. The pick and place side of warehouse operations should be robotic. Shelf restocking in stores ought to be robotic. All of those things have been demoed, but didn't go to production.
Yes, AI is still not particularly prevalent in the customer-facing / consumer-facing things you described. But internally, I think these companies are up to their eyeballs in AI automations. At the company I work for, the customer-facing side of our business has not really been changed by AI (except for faster iteration of website design, and a somewhat limited customer service chatbot - not particularly good like your experience). But internally we are using it for so many things, for example we have brought 3rd party analytics tools in-house (cost reduction and ownership over our data) by writing our own internal tools, we have setup custom systems to give ourselves better visibility over the business to try catch issues earlier, we use it to produce internal reports, etc.
I don't have much experience in robotics but I've heard that machine vision models have absolutely been changing the industry. And I imagine they are also using AI to write a lot of software too. But not my area, just what I've heard / been reading.