Any chatbot/AI that i can't say "please refund this order due to product being damaged here is a pic" and it can't do a refund on its own is worthless. Not because i care about refunds, but if the bot can't do that, chances are it can't do anything real and its just trained on a bunch of docs and is worthless otherwise.
It's also 10x worse when the website has a green circle on it like teams/zoom showing it as "online" and makes you feel like you are actually talking to someone.
Obviously we'll let customers decide how to deploy this tech, but our vision is less about "chat with AI customer support", and more "tap into intelligence to help you achieve your task".
I personally fell in love with copilots when all my engineering tools started adding them (e.g. Cursor IDE, Warp terminal, etc.).
And really, I wanted to tap into artificial intelligence everywhere, from excel to planning a vacation in AirBnb. "is this a good place to stay with a young kid?"
Just in recent months, the market has validated this intuition, e.g. Microsoft Copilot products (think 2nd-brain-on-tap for e.g. PowerPoint, not support chat) have boosted productivity by 30%, with lots of other impressive metrics
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If you do go back to the customer support use-case,
I'd see the support agent's software using CopilotTextarea, to let them reply to 10x more messages, but where they still drive the conversation.
Though I could see it coupled with AI chatbot on the consumer side, where it makes sense
It should not be cumbersome to enter your query and be suggested a solution before being connected to a human. In some cases the suggestion will resolve the problem, relieving the load on responders.
but having been on the other side, requests like yours are the exception. support chatbots relieve a huge load, allowing the real people to work on real requests like yours rather than the numerous junk ones.
Chat interface is used to talk to people. If you talk to a machine, there is no point to mimic human behaviour, especially when current iterations of AI can't reason. There should be a better way to do this.
Like 90% of the time I want to chat to customer rep, because I want to let them now there were missing items in the delivery and I want re-delivery or refund. That could be a simple expert system with a few buttons. But businesses want to discourage people from returning anything, so they are building those time wasting widgets hoping a % of people give up.
Like if my time costs £200 per hour and the wrong delivery was worth £50, I am not going to spend more than 15 minutes on this, unless it is critical to the business.
This has nothing to do with helping customers, but to save money.
I responded to a sibling comment of yours about the chat aspect (TL;DR: our key objective is very far from human customer support - more similar to "chat with your codebase" if you use e.g. Cursor IDE).
But I think you do bring an interesting point, that chat interface is just one type of way to talk to computers, and in some sense it's the "laziest" way, since it's what we use to talk to people now.
The Textarea is actually an example of another non-chat way to "talk" to the AI intelligence. I do think we'll see a lot more being discovered by the community over the next 2 years (and we'll build those into CopilotKit, of course)
