i’ll go first. i work at a mid-size SaaS company and about 6 months ago leadership decided we were going to be an AI-first company because the CEO went to a conference and came back speaking in tongues about automation and efficiency.
first thing they did was replace our entire 12 person customer support team with an AI chatbot. they laid off all 12 people on a friday and chatbot went live on monday.
the chatbot was trained on our help docs which sounds fine except our help docs haven’t been updated since 2023 and half of them reference features we don’t offer anymore. so from day one this thing was confidently directing customers to buttons that don’t exist and pages that 404.
but the real problem is the fallback response bc whoever set it up made the default response for anything the bot can’t answer “have you tried restarting your device?” everything and every question. someone literally asked for a refund and the bot told them to restart their computer.
it’s been 6 months and our CSAT score has dropped 40% so does our churn rate doubled. we’ve had 3 customers post screenshots on twitter of the bot giving unhinged responses and one of them went viral lol
the best part is leadership still calls it a success because we reduced support costs by 80%. yeah we also reduced our customers by 30% but nobody’s put that in the quarterly deck yet. the CEO still opens every all-hands by saying our AI transformation is ahead of schedule. ahead of schedule toward what like bankruptcy pls
what’s the worst AI implementation you’ve seen?
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