At one point in the article, the author asks Cloudflare's bot if they're launching a Wallet product, and it says no.
> There is no such product in our documentation or dashboard, so treat any email, website, or message claiming to be "Cloudflare Wallet" as a phishing attempt.
What's the point of adding these AI chatbots if they're hopelessly uninformed about your products?
The point is to show how AI you are.
heh yeah I ran into this with one of the few times I used claude desktop. it had no idea what features it had and didn't have, where buttons were in the app, etc. isn't that kind of a core category of knowledge you'd want the chatbot to know?
Things like this change fast, it has a skill it can use now to find out. I'm not sure when they added it, I only noticed it last week.
in my experience, usually it knows this (it is in the system prompt) but it can still get confused. Especially with skills for example, some skills might only work in claude code/outside of sandbox or in desktop but not on web. And it would sometimes not know if it was on the web or desktop.
The next AI benchmark is can an agent understand the product suite of its creators.
That would clearly be superhuman intelligence, as I suspect the employees would struggle with that one.
The point is to signal to investors that they're all-in on the current fad, thus making the stock price go up.
What’s the point? To save money paying a human to man a support email. That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons.
> That human would have also been hopelessly uninformed for all the same reasons.
Not really. At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering.
In fact, they would have likely already heard about the new product at lunch or something.
Most chat support people were contractors hired from third party companies that were given dossiers about their products that were often quite out of date because poor management has always been a thing.
Last time Coinbase had a breach I wrote in to support chat to see what I needed to do. They said there was no breach. I sent them a link to their own blogpost about it. They responded with "wow this is the fist time I'm hearing about this."
> At minimum, a half-way decent support person would ask a few people internally or search Slack before answering.
Of course not. The extremely vast majority of support staff aren't connected to "internal people" and certainly don't have any access to the main company's Slack.
Most of all, those people are paid very little on very tight length-per-interaction targets. They can't spend any time at all looking for stuff outside the docs package or chatting with peeps outside the immediate costaff.
Everything I said applies to overseas labor, too. I’ve worked at both types of companies, those that co-locate support with the product teams, and those that pay bottom dollar and don’t care at all about support.
With the latter type, there’s still almost always a line of communication to corporate. And the support staff still try to help. They are decent human beings, even if the end result kind of sucks.
Its an organic cycle, as the company grows big the number of relevant areas grow too and inter team communication becomes way too costly/impractical. The big company becomes a group of informal small companies, each running in their own direction and at times competing with each other. Areas like customer support are not really good candidate for career growth so they get least resources and manpower.
If you have no training or knowledge-base to search, sure. But then you'd be an awful support-team employer.
I mean, yes? That sounds pretty accurate for most companies before chatbots became the new hot thing
Uninformed chatbot replaces uninformed person. And the chatbot doesn't need bathroom breaks or health insurance.
And as a dark pattern it adds "positive friction" for the company reducing the number of people that will have the motivation of obtaining the real people support.
Several weeks ago I had an issue not being able to login to Verizon's website, so I tried to chat with someone. The chatbot that was gatekeeping was predictably useless said it would redirect me to a human except...it kept prompting me to log in first. It was literally impossible to differentiate from if they literally had no humans online to talk to at all.
I could be the best money saver for them - and ask for a hefty premium for my services - by terminating all support. No costs, nada, full save! Genius, right?! Never gives false info, never!
Ok, ok, need to have a tickmark next to the 'support' item in the quarterlies, let it be an eternal spinning wheel presenting on clicking the 'Our award winning instant support is HERE!' button then. Its close to the real experience anyway, right?
To avoid wasting customer time, simply make that button close the window.