1. It's not "an extra layer", at most it's a replacement for the existing thing you're lamenting, in the businesses you're already objecting to.
2. The businesses which use this tool at its best, can glue the LLM to their documentation[0], and once that's done, each extra user gets "really good even though it's not perfect" customer support at negligible marginal cost to the company, rather than the current affordable option of "ask your fellow users on our subreddit or discord channel, or read our FAQ".
[0] a variety of ways — RAG is a popular meme now, but I assume it's going to be like MapReduce a decade ago, where everyone copies the tech giants without understanding the giant's reasons or scale
It's an extra layer of "Have you looked at our website/read our documentation/clicked the button" that I've already done, before I will (if I'm lucky) be passed onto a human that will proceed to do the same thing before I can actually get support for my issue.
If I'm unlucky it'll just be another stage in the mobius-support-strip that directs me from support web page to chatbot to FAQ and back to the webpage.
The businesses which use this tool best will be the ones that manage to lay off the most support staff and cut the most cost. Sad as that is for the staff, that's not my gripe. My gripe is that it's just going to get even harder to reach a real actual person who is able to take a real actual action, because providing support is secondary to controlling costs for most companies these days.
Take for example the pension company I called recently to change an address - their support page says to talk to their bot, which then says to call a number, which picks up, says please go to your online account page to complete this action and then hangs up... an action which the account page explicitly says cannot be completed online because I'm overseas, so please talk to the bot, or you can call the number. In the end I had to call an office number I found through google and be transferred between departments.
An LLM is not going to help with that, it's just going to make the process longer and more frustrating, because the aim is not to resolve problems, it's to stop people taking the time of a human even when they need to, because that costs money.
1. It's not "an extra layer", at most it's a replacement for the existing thing you're lamenting, in the businesses you're already objecting to.
2. The businesses which use this tool at its best, can glue the LLM to their documentation[0], and once that's done, each extra user gets "really good even though it's not perfect" customer support at negligible marginal cost to the company, rather than the current affordable option of "ask your fellow users on our subreddit or discord channel, or read our FAQ".
[0] a variety of ways — RAG is a popular meme now, but I assume it's going to be like MapReduce a decade ago, where everyone copies the tech giants without understanding the giant's reasons or scale