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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

#51

Post by sicktriple »

Do we think that as a society there exists some meaningful lever by which we can apply force against this type of carelessness and exploitation?

I think we need to take a good hard look at what we want out of this world and ask ourselves. Do we really need to automate this? Like really. What benefit does the world receive having an AI chatbot tell grandma the wrong doage for her meds? This is the naked extraction of value from a service that's already been offshored. Companies like these are gleeful to make their service as shitty as they can because they know their users are doing so against their will. Infact, that's become the goal.

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

#52

Post by sicktriple »

anon7725 wrote: post #34
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…

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

Why would he care about that? They're not the ones paying him.

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

#53

Post by jonathan-adly »

dylan604 wrote: post #36
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…

> 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 some spoiled tech worker who stumbled into this industry. I ran these pharmacies for over a decade before ever writing a line of code.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#55

Post by jimberlage »

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…

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

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

#56

Post by reaperducer »

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…

We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy.

Is your pharmacy one of your customers? Do you use your own product regularly?

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

#57

Post by jonathan-adly »

jimberlage wrote: post #55
jonathan-adly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#58

Post by dylan604 »

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…

Clueless? You sound tone deaf. If you came here thinking everyone would love your product becase AI, well, sorry about that.

Just because you think it is an amazing product does not mean the rest of us will agree with you. It's right up there with "I've never had a problem with it so anyone claiming to have a problem is wrong" mentality. It was your comment acknowledging the public does not like your product or products like yours. You just think your product is better than others. That may be true but it again does not mean it is so good that the public enjoys interacting with your product.

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

#60

Post by reaperducer »

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…

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 healthcare tech. My company doesn't permit such things because people die. I'll write it again because it's a point that tech fetishes can't get into their heads:

People die.

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