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

Post by chrisjj » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

Post by pasc1878 » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

lagrange77 wrote: post #44

barbazoo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make it so the parts that are done by AI are rock solid, until then, they shouldn't be near a customer and be done by humans. Resist the greed!

So you want him to make a piece of software that models a probability distribution rock solid.

Post by chrisjj » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

Oras wrote: post #50

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…

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…

Post by Marsymars » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #37

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…

This, I suspect, is exactly like offshoring - and a lot of companies died during the offshoring fad because their software products become full of low quality merges and feature improvements that the company couldn't afford to fix or remove by the time they realized there was a problem. That remains my primary concern with AI code generation - well established codebases might become full of slop to the point of being…

Post by dcrazy » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

swatcoder wrote: post #65

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…

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…