A penny for the thoughts of our thankless call center workers.
Long have they had to endure indignant customers fuming at them for problems beyond their control. And now they must suffer accusations that call their very humanity in question, Bloomberg reports, as the proliferation of AI tech has many callers suspecting that the human they're speaking to is actually a chatbot.
If these customer support personnel weren't treated like robots before, in other words, they are now — in a distressingly literal sense.
Jessica Lindsey is one call center agent who's fallen victim to this paranoid thinking. At her job at Concentrix, where she takes calls for American Express, she tells Bloomberg that she's regularly harassed by shouting customers who demand to speak to a real human, or straight up ask if she's an AI.
"Speak to a representative! Speak to a representative!" they might yell, as if casting a spell that magically takes them to the top of a phone tree.
And to be fair, a lot of the time customers are speaking to an AI or a pre-recorded message before they're handed over to a human rep. This saves the companies money, but at the cost of the humans on both ends of the phone: the customer is left frustrated, and the call center agent is dumped with the unenviable task of conciliating their rage induced by a thousand bots.
Sometimes, Lindsey tries to show she's not an AI by coughing or giggling. "I even ask them, 'Is there anything you want me to say to prove that I'm a real human?'" she told Bloomberg. This often has the opposite of the intended effect.
"They just end up yelling at me and hanging up," she said, sometimes leaving her in tears. "Like, I can't believe I just got cut down at 9:30 in the morning because they had to deal with the AI before they got to me."
This has been Lindsey's experience as AI has come to the forefront of social discourse of the last few years — and over time, it clearly takes its toll.
She's far from alone, though. Seth, another US-based Concentrix employee, estimated to Bloomberg that he's asked if he's an AI once a week. One customer grilled him for 20 minutes to see if he was a bot, asking questions about his hobbies.
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