Some companies find only humans can do the job

Humans still better at taking orders and making coffee too.

If the robots were good enough to replace humans they’d be good enough to demand minimum wage laws and professional licensing requirements.

Robots are too expensive; that is to say; humans are (a lot) cheaper. If you want to buy a Spot robot to pick up garbage, you are out 70k for the base model, 100k+ with some plugins, they need to charge every hour so you need multiple and there are maintenance costs (it’s not like you buy one of these and have no other costs outside electric for 10 years). In many countries humans are a lot cheaper than that for those manual jobs; depending on the work which determines the maintenance costs, maybe even yearly.

We either need to acknowledge humans are more valuable (which is utopia and won’t happen easily) or have high quality robots for 5k or less with 8-10 hour battery life (or hot-swappable; you buy an extra robot that just runs around bringing batteries to and from robots and chargers). And, as with all mass production, that will take time.

I spent a lot of time and effort deploying automation in customer service. The idea was to do it in ways that were really valuable, as opposed to spreadsheet positive. Our management had been toasted too many times by folks selling snake oil, but my god savings were needed.

They just had to be real...

So first issue: developing measures that measure real overall service productivity... this is hard, the gaming is intense.

Second issue: automation generates work. Yup. When your service workers get time they use it to address difficult cases and to do the work that removes regulatory and safety risks. The rest of the time this stuff is ignored, building hidden risk for the enterprise. Relieve the pressure, and it reemerges.

Third issue: peak demands. Ideally automation would help you deal with peak demands enabling human staffing at sensible levels to handle most of the traffic most of the time. Sadly it doesn't. Peak demand often seemed to be for the work that could least be automated.

Forth issue: the tech is a castle of lies. Ok, that's not quite true... but there is a lot of lying. In the academic work the lying is of the form of what is left out of the experiments and evaluations - for example that the algorithm cost $100k to run or something. In the commercial world there is flat out lying - HAL I look at you, you bastard. How many RFI's were derailed by some regional President at a supplier ringing my CIO or CEO and explaining that I was "a problem" and had "an attitude"... well, all of them. The issue is that there is no sanction. HAL is still pushing Holmes and winning contracts, and not delivering what they promise, because it's all a lie. All that happens is that they move to the next sucker and wait for management churn at the old sucker to erase the corporate memory, and this does not take long. In reality they should all be drummed out of the business and no one should ever speak to them again.

But, five years later I am still flogging my guts out and they are all on their boats and golf courses. One of the bastards had his own vineyard.

So, sigh