AI remove accountability along with human interaction

Businesses risk damaging long-term customer trust if artificial intelligence becomes a substitute for responsibility rather than a tool for better service

Sir,

Your recent article on AI customer service failures struck a chord with me, correctly identifying a problem many consumers now, sadly, recognise instinctively.

Too often, artificial intelligence is being introduced to reduce human involvement as far as possible, without any thought about improving customer experience. The result is exactly as you expressed, namely that people increasingly find themselves trapped inside AI systems without anyone responsible for their rescue.

When something goes wrong, nobody appears fully accountable. This is ludicrous. Technology points towards company policy, the policy points towards the technology, and the customer is left navigating an endless automated loop as if they were stuck in a cave system without a map or flashlight.

Do companies not understand that any form of friction with their customers ultimately harms their bottom line? Are they so confident that the cost savings generated by automation will offset the exodus to rivals which still value human interaction?

Because when you choose a business, you value the reassurance of human judgement as much as the service itself. Efficiency in corporate language, it seems, is coming to mean wilful ignorance of their customers’ problems.

Artificial intelligence clearly has enormous potential when used intelligently and responsibly, but organisations that deploy it primarily as a barrier need to bring in another form of intelligence that seems in increasingly short supply: common sense.

Richard Carver