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

Post by asdff » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

dcrazy wrote: post #90

swatcoder wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, most tech companies of comparable size to your customers have negative margins and survive on investment cycles, and the tech companies that are bigger haven't offered human support to anyone in decades. (And indeed, everyone already resents this practice and those tech companies. Generally, sentiment is abyssmal.) I know you're just trying to illustrate the real plight of your customers, but it's a bad illust…

Microsoft offers human chat support for consumers, once you try their self-help tools: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus?ContactUsExper... Apple offers online, telephone, and of course in-person support for hardware and software: https://support.apple.com/?cid=mc-ols-general-homepage-marco... Amazon offers online and telephone customer support on your “my orders” page. Netflix offers phone and chat suppor…

Post by chrisjj » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

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…

Post by phatfish » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

voicedYoda wrote: post #126

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…

I've been building agentic voice workflows with nearly 2 decades of healthcare experience. Would love to talk if you're available.

Post by gamblor956 » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

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…

Post by le-mark » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

cmiles8 wrote: post #4

Companies will pawn off thier customers to AI at their peril. In many ways this is a repeat of the India call center train wrecks of the 00s. On paper, letting someone in Bangalore vs onshore handle incoming customer service calls looked like a path to amazing savings. In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. AI…