An acquaintance of mine has basically been doing this for years in the form of slop code written by the cheapest outsourcing firms on earth who cannot comprehend rudimentary requirements and have no concept of coding standards. But management insists this is the most cost effective way of doing things, rather than just having a competent group of qualified people do it right from the start.

It seems as depressing as you’d think.

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.