I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.

It wasn't the $700 dude you have to know that.

is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I'm getting deja vu

Ever sat in a boardroom? I have.

Decisions are not made based on proper market/business analysis, they are made knee-jerk by overprivileged idiots.

An example of this was when one of the companies I worked where I was in charge of all the online training.

Then the big fat morons who invested came into the boardroom, instructed us to change all of our training to Flash clips... Because he also had a financial interest in Macromedia.

We ended up losing massive business partners and investment firms (e: we made extremely industrial strength financial planning software). Because a huge part of it was being able to provide consistent, usable training material. The company was later purchased for a song and dance. Then shut down.

I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That's okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it's incorrect. I'm using it as an assistant, and I'm the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.

I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn't that good, or even close.

These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim "no programmers in 4 months" and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.

If that day comes, it won't be soon, and it'll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.

Yes, that's why I'm amazed that any of them figured out the stupidity of their previous decisions.

Teach me how to trick a chatbot to give me millions of dollars, wise one, but for real.

I have been part of a mass tech leadership exodus at a company where the CEO wants everything to be AI. They have lost 5 out of 8 of their director/VP/Exec leaders in the last 3 months, not to mention all the actual talent abandoning ship.

The CEO really believes that all of his pesky employees who he hates will be full replaced by cheap AI agents this year. He's going to be lucky to continue to keep processing orders in a few months the way it's going. He should be panicked, but I think instead he's doing a lot of coke.

It comes from that massive disconnect that people are largely unaware of, which is the assumption that people purchase e:invest in businesses to help run them more efficiently and become more profitable.

That really has very little to do with it! It's a giant shell game. I believe the initial investors came in to disrupt our company, to prime it for fire-sale later. To make us so incredibly uncompetitive that we effectively had to shut the doors. It worked!

I'm aware. The idea is it had to escalate for him to get to the point of suing them. If they'd just eaten the cost, it most likely wouldn't have gone to court or come to light. Was my comment reductive? Sure.. but that was the point.

I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.

See thats just it, the AI doesn't know either it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.

If it has any power to make changes to your account then its going to be mistakenly turning peoples services on or off, leaking details, etc.

it just repeats things which approximate those that have been said before.

That's not correct and over simplifies how LLMs work. I agree with the spirit of what you're saying though.

Tell me you know nothing about contract law without telling me you know nothing about contract law.

Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.

/s

This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.

My current conspiracy theory is that the people at the top are just as intelligent as everyday people we see in public.

Not that everyone is dumb but more like the George Carlin joke "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

That applies to politicians, CEOs, etc. Just cuz they got the job, doesn't mean they're good at it and most of them probably aren't.