Most chatbots are both useless and tedious to interact with. But I've also had plenty of interactions with human first-level support that's just following a script without any actual understanding. An AI would be able to provide a genuine improvement over that.
AI isn't an improvement for companies that already provide great customer support, but it has the ability to seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively
That is exactly what is happening at my employer, and it’s been really effective for trivial support, especially when it’s empowered to make meaningful changes on the customer’s behalf. It’s got large swaths of the whole UX in chat, with an authenticated session. You could see it being better a better experience than clicking around anyhow. It does a great job at search too. Lots of room to improve but it’s hitting its targets for reducing human support time and as a sales tool.
AI isn't an improvement for companies that already provide great customer support, but it has the ability to seriously raise the bar for companies that want to keep customer support costs low or that have a lot of trivial requests that they have to deal with cost-effectively