the thing is, I don't care if the AI agents get better; I want to speak to a human who has the cognitive ability, flexibility and authority to handle my problem.

I understand some people call with trivial or easy questions, and those might be handled just fine by an AI agent (just as they would by a human). But if I'm calling it's because it's not easy or trivial, otherwise I would have figured it out. Calling is always a last resort. And it's also because I want something handled quickly and don't want to spend time trying to navigate a maze of questions to try to get the AI agent up to speed and do what I want. So all the agent does is make me upset and not want to do business with that company again. And the more difficult the agent makes it to get to speak with a human, the more unhappy I become.

Stop trying to cut costs and extract maximum value while making things worse for customers, and stop trying to tell yourself -- and us -- that this somehow provides a superior experience for customers. That's BS. I've seen the step by step decline in phone customer service over the past 30 years, it has clearly never been about the user experience.