Now if AI agents are free to issue refunds or discounts by their own? Great, let's do that and suddenly most people are on board. But get ready for rampant abuse.

Best solution would be an AI cyborg system where it readies a recommendation and a human swings by and approves or denies it without wasting time talking to people. But users would hate that (anti-social), it would still be ripe for abuse. But it is likely the longer term solution, as people will quickly realize they can use web chat or Google AI to get the exact responses as your FAQ bot which means you have removed actual customer service and this is a non-product.

AI is definitely capable of taking on customer support work at the moment, and to a high standard as well. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's not a grift either.

I’m not sure where you’re getting this from but their customers find Fin to be a hugely impactful tool

There's a wide swath of companies that do < (say) 20,000 cases monthly where the economics will never make sense. And a company finds Fin successful as it grows to 20k/mo, why would it decide to take on the headache as it grows to the 50k/mo? or whatever level where the economics could feasibly make in-house work?

However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.

For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.

On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.

That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.

It could be great but it’s already awful.

But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.

AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.

So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.

This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.

Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.

Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.

Salesforce trades at a 4x revenue multiple, FYI.

Also, taking a TAM and multiplying it by 5% to back into a revenue figure is like “if we only get 1% of the market” math.

I’m not saying you’re directionally wrong. But the claims you’re making can be rigorously made. And I’d argue they’re interesting when they are.

That $3 bln number encodes all of that in a price. Not much more to rationalize. It's quite beautiful.