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Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

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Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#371

Post by marcosdumay »

ck2 wrote: post #96
dbalatero wrote: post #5

I could be wrong, but it feels like one issue is that AI seems to cater more as a signal to venture capital and the internals of the tech industry in a lot of these products, while consumers just want to know "what is this product going to actually do for me," and care less about whether it is implemented with the buzzword du jour.

Is anyone old enough to remember the switch from customer call centers having a human quickly answer to long long annoying phone menus because that friction, getting the customer to do some work or busy distraction, somehow saved costs for the company? No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human) "AI" to me means the exact same thing company wants to cut costs…

> No-one likes phone menus and immediately wants to escape them (then they disable pressing 0 for human)

They beat waiting for somebody to answer the phone just to tell you they are sending the call to somebody else and you'll have to explain everything again.

The sequences where you authenticate on the menu and no person is allowed to ask for authentication information makes sense too. I don't think anybody actually like it, but it is better than the alternative.

Nobody likes badly designed menus.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#372

Post by phainopepla2 »

lqet wrote: post #145

I had the pleasure of communicating with the AI bot of FedEx (in Germany) today: > Everything is sorted out! > Everything is now sorted out, and I hope this solution works well for you. Of course nothing was sorted out (several mails and a call to the distribution center did sort things out).

Reminiscent of when coding agents fail to fix a bug and keep digging themselves deeper into a hole.

> I understand the problem now, I just need to... > I was wrong before but the issue is now clear, let me... > I have complete clarity now! I'm going to...

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#373

Post by FeteCommuniste »

Angostura wrote: post #304
smcl wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in…

I think AI has also become synonymous with slapdash, low effort, probably steals my data

Precisely. "We're doing this with AI" reads as "we don't care enough about this to pay a person to do it."

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#374

Post by bigstrat2003 »

inigyou wrote: post #76
dngray wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real thing i think people forget is that humans actually value time and effort from other humans. AI is often used by people who want to do neither and that's really what it boils down to. Ask yourself, would you like to receive a christmas or birthday card with a personalized message or something produced you know was 100% produced by AI bot - even better when it has a hallucination in there.

But that's the rare exception. Almost nobody prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA, especially when they see the price tag.

Everyone prefers an artisanal chair over one from IKEA. The only reason they go for the latter is because that's what they can afford, not because they would get that option if all else were equal.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#375

Post by kbar13 »

does this mean that 40% of consumers say it's good? or what?

if that is what that means, i would actually say keep improving... since ai is new and there's a lot of mixed feelings about it, it's understandable that sentiment leaks into ai-enabled products.

that being said, there are /a lot/ of ai chatbot product integrations that are actual dogwater and we should not do them. like the stupid amazon integration that is forced upon me that took up like 30% of my screen and straight up just was worthless.

i think the best ai consumer facing workflows you dont actually directly interface with ai via what is expected to be a human interface like chat - it should do processing in the backend, or it supports a human agent.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#376

Post by AlecSchueler »

dylan604 wrote: post #325
victor106 wrote: post #314

>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…

The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.

I think the only place so far where I have actually preferred the AI version was when my phone provider switched from a "dumb" chat bot that ostensibly used natural language but rarely parsed anything successfully.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#377

Post by prmoustache »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #356
prmoustache wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thinks so because the ai bot will reliably give you the answers you could already get from the website to begin with and will never solve your problem. If people are calling or opening an interactive chat, this is because all automatized procedures have already failed and you are in a situation not supported by them.

I think people clicking through websites will be viewed the same as people going to the library and reading through books to research. You just get the information you need way quicker. Recently I had to make changes to cancel my flight. Luckily the website had an agent and I used it to cancel my flight. Didn't have to wait for an email/chat or worse call. I even rescheduled my flight using the same website agent. It…

I'd tend to say that it is probably because they haven't yet crippled their AI bot with the same dark patterns (trying to make you select insurance, paid selection of seats, additional luggages, rented car at the airport) as they do on the website.

Airlines websites could be so much simpler and quick to use if they weren't designed to be full of traps.

Don't expect that edge to persist indefinitely, they are in the adoption phase.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#378

Post by thayne »

fckgw wrote: post #324
victor106 wrote: post #314

>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…

What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest

They care more about short term cost reduction than long term effects of upsetting customers. Even moreso if there is a lack of significant competition, as is often the case for companies doing this, since customers can't just easily switch to something else.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#379

Post by nonethewiser »

nerdjon wrote: post #200
nonethewiser wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhhh kind of. What you say is definitely true of some products but it's funny, because the EXACT same criticisms were levied against machine learning. - "ML is such a buzzword. Everyone is trying to shoe-horn it into their product." - "Why are they putting 'machine learning' in their hero section? Just do the thing well. ML is an implementation detail." - "You dont even need ML for this. Simple linear regression woul…

There is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles. Or at most there was a quick reference to "ML" when a feature was announced but it wasn't shoving "ML is doing this THIS" in every UI it could. Sure we could argue that there were times that ML was likely not really necessary, but it was still largely invisible to the user what the mechanism was. I think about autocorre…

> here is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles.

No, not at all. That was a chief complaint. Grandma doesnt give a fuck about machine learning, why are they advertising it?

> I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.

Right. And that's why this isnt an example of the phenomena. Nowhere did I say machine learning was useless.

Re: Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

#380

Post by willchis »

victor106 wrote: post #314

>No customer or user wakes up and says, ‘I hope I get to talk to a chat bot or an AI agent today This is so true. I led the implementation of an AI customer service agent and even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story. Our customers hated it. I haven’t seen anything in tech that is hated more. Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we wen…

I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.
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