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Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

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Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#101

Post by Terr_ »

Marsymars wrote: post #68
Oras wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good for you and wishing you more success. You probably going to be down voted as sentiment here in HN is going against AI due to the pressure on jobs, which is completely understandable from emotional point. People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. How many errors happened due to human phone operators? In the last few days there was an article where humans scored 6…

> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes. I'm currently dealing with a mont…

Right, of the faster/better/cheaper triad, these things are overwhelmingly being implemented towards cheaper, and the idea that owners can gut the support structure for errors and edge-cases.

I realize quoting Doctorow on this is... rather low-hanging fruit for this topic, but I like how this scenario suggests the AI company makes more money when the implementation is hostile to the consumer:

> We’ve heard some pretty credible stuff about how AI can be used to spot solid mass tumors that sometimes humans miss. And, you know, if there was a sales call right now at your local hospital, where there was a pitchman for an AI company telling the hospital administrator, “Here’s what we’re going to do. Right now you have 10 radiologists. They cost $3 million a year. They review a hundred X-rays a day each. And I tell you what: I’m going to sell you a chatbot for a million bucks a year. And it’s going to sit in the shadows, and a couple of times a day, it’s going to tap your radiologist on the shoulder and say, 'Why don't you take another look at that one? I’d be very happy,’” that would seem like a real advance on medicine. But that’s not how the pitch is going.

> [...] But what the AI companies want to sell you is: fire nine-tenths of your radiologists, save $2.7 million a year, split that between the hospital shareholders and Sam Altman, take that remaining radiologist and put them in charge of marking the AI’s homework, put them in charge of clicking OK a hundred times a minute for the radiology reports that are coming out of the chatbot, and then, when it misses something and someone dies, blame that guy, make him what Dan Davies calls the “accountability sink” for the AI.

-- https://www.democracynow.org/2026/6/25/reverse_centaur_docto...

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#102

Post by cameldrv »

Oras wrote: post #76
Marsymars wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People tend to compare AI to perfection for some reasons, which is not the case with humans. So I mostly avoid commenting on or pontificating about the value or lack thereof of AI, but the problem I have with companies rolling out "AI for whatever" isn't that sometimes AI gets "whatever" wrong, it's that the companies simultaneous gut the processes around correcting these mistakes. I'm currently dealing with a mont…

I actually made another comment about lack of leadership causing many issues including exhausting dev teams. What you describe is an execution failure not AI, these are basic NLP systems that could be easily configured with some dataset to make them better, but i will make a wild guess that the bank has incompetent manager who was pushing for some numbers to put in a slide to say “I” did this.

The parent commenter's experience pretty much sums up my experience with every IVR system, AI or not. The IVR cannot do anything I can't do on the website or the app. I wouldn't be calling if I could get the job done without calling them, so my experience is simply that the IVR is simply an obstacle to talking to a human. Very often the first human I talk to is simply an obstacle to talking to the second human, because the first human is so limited in their knowledge and authority that they can't do anything I can't do with the website or app either.

I don't really think this is an implementation problem or incompetence. AI is just not reliable enough yet to deal with long tail situations, especially in cases where the most common procedures don't apply. You can't give it the authority to override common-case business rules or make financially consequential decisions, because it will be manipulated/prompt injected by fraudsters.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#103

Post by SoftTalker »

reaperducer wrote: post #60
jonathan-adly wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPS typically improves because no one stays on hold for 20+ mins anymore. People have no ideas have pharmacies work. Pharmacies don't control how much they pay for drug, or how much they get paid. The margins are terrible and you can't hire enough techs to answer the phone at peak call volume. So - most people experience are terrible as they wait on hold for a really long time. EVEN if the AI is a little rough around…

EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls with no hold is a massive win. You keep saying that reducing call time is the "win." It seems like that the only metric you're measuring. If so, your product is a failure, not a success. This is HEALTHCARE . You don't get to do "rough around the edges." You don't get to dismiss edge cases. I also work in heal…

As if the techs making $15/hr answering the phone don't make mistakes?

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#104

Post by therein »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #53
dylan604 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready". This is such a great graph. Your company feels successful because your customer is happy yet the rest of the world would be just happy if your company died in a fire. This seems to also be just fine for companies like yours…

Very much clueless commentary. Retail pharmacies in the US are dying dozens a day. They don't have margin to support people answering the phone like tech companies with 80% margin do. Welcome to the real world where it is survival for these pharmacies not greed or shareholder value. They literally lose money filling your branded prescription even with no labor baked in. We are their lifeline. I know because I am not…

> We are their lifeline.

Yeaaaah, I don't think that's true at all but I am glad it makes you feel virtuous and helpful.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#105

Post by GreenVulpine »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #25

So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider. First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important doma…

Starting with your funding and who you've acquired tells me whatever follows is not really worth reading.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#106

Post by drewg123 »

Actual personal service from a human being is the main reason that I'd choose a small regional pharmacy over a local CVS or mail-order. It seems to me like personal service is the ONLY advantage a regional chain like this has. If I were them, I'd lean into it rather than burning customer's goodwill with AI.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#107

Post by drewg123 »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #42
anon7725 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy How happy are their patients?

NPS typically improves because no one stays on hold for 20+ mins anymore. People have no ideas have pharmacies work. Pharmacies don't control how much they pay for drug, or how much they get paid. The margins are terrible and you can't hire enough techs to answer the phone at peak call volume. So - most people experience are terrible as they wait on hold for a really long time. EVEN if the AI is a little rough around…

I'll gladly take a 20min hold after having to resort to screaming "give me a fucking human" or driving the the pharmacy JUST TO TALK TO a human in the exceptions, which seem to be about 75% of my interactions with CVS/Walgreens AI agents.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#108

Post by nickphx »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #57
jimberlage wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2024.0... Of the 88,930 retail pharmacies operating during 2010–20, 29.4 percent had closed by 2021.

and that was not due to answering phones .. adding a nondeterministic black box of bullshit will change nothing.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#109

Post by SoftTalker »

recursive wrote: post #73
munk-a wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drug names are frequently BS loaded with strange consonants without singular pronunciation guidelines (sadly English isn't German) so humans already have a lot of variation in how things are pronounced - models then need to comprehend those variations, regional dialects (like those fuggin' ahs from Boston). It ends up being quite a lot of variation. As some examples: Wegovy, Ixempra, Qvar, Keflex

Wow, those names are actually real. They sound like fly-by-night compliance "brand" names on amazon sellers. How did those get approved by a multi-billion dollar marketing team?

They need a name they can trademark, and common words can't be trademarked. It's sort of a .com domain name problem, all the good names are already taken so you just go for something you hope is pronouncable.

Re: Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

#110

Post by Scoundreller »

43920 wrote: post #70
jimberlage wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were pharmacies viable before? Presumably they didn't lose money for their whole history.

Most pharmacies are having financial issues basically due to being stuck in the middle of the battle between insurers, drug manufacturers, and PBMs over reimbursement rates, and having the weakest negotiating position of all of the parties. AI probably will save the pharmacies some money, but IMO this will probably cause reimbursement rates to decline further, leaving the pharmacies in the same position as before.

Tbh, this is most industries. Very few have much of a moat and have some wedge/pressure from their suppliers (land/labor/capital), their clients and competition.

Insurance companies and PBMs would probably say the same they have competitors (ie:replaceable) and can’t just pay more for this or that, or reject any cost saving measure available.

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