Unpopular Take – Does anyone besides me have AI Fatigue? I know everyone will think I am stupid for even trying to mention that AI is not the greatest thing ever, but I am about tired of hearing about it every five seconds.
I am a contact center guy, so this is written only through the lens of the contact center world, but unless you are blind and deaf, you have seen and heard the AI hype train.
Let me start out by saying, I appreciate, like, and respect AI. Please do not hear me say anything other than that. AI is awesome and amazing, and very useful. No doubt about that, and you would be a fool to say otherwise.
However, I am suffering from a strong case of AI fatigue, and I just need to ask… Am I the only one? AI fatigue, for me, means that every 3 seconds I am inundated with how much of a life-changing, and work force-changing, and business-changing thing it is, and if you don’t have it, you will be dead soon and you are a terrible leader or employee if you are not all in on AI. Spend 10 seconds on LinkedIn and look at the number of AI “experts” all of a sudden.
You have to have AI to hire, AI to train, AI to recruit, AI to develop workflows, AI to perform the work, AI to do anything, best I can tell.
Every time I go on LinkedIn there is another AI developer who is swearing this version is going to be the one that changes the marketplace completely. And then, 3 minutes later, no, actually, this is the version that is going to change the marketplace completely. So on and so forth. It is like a few years ago when everyone and everything was a “disruptor”. Well, if every version is the greatest version and everything is/was a disruptor, I guess nothing is a disruptor because that is all there is.
Again, I think AI is a great tool, and this is not a hit piece on AI. It is a hit piece on the hype train around it. Honestly, I think the AI hype train is the biggest thing working against AI’s adoption. The hype train has AI so far up on the pedestal that it is impossible for it to deliver on what people think it can do. Stop presenting it as a 100% problem solver and market it as a tool that can help you in about 20% of situations.
A great example is our iPhones. Remember when Apple Intelligence was going to be amazing, and then when it came, and you pushed the button, it was actually the exact same version of Siri there always was, but the screen lit up in a cool way, and it became Apple Intelligence and not Siri. But really it was a cool marketing campaign by Apple and a new screen graphic and that was about it. And this is Apple we are talking about. One of the greatest tech companies to ever exist.
The biggest problem for AI is the gap between what people think it can do versus what it can actually do. And we are actually getting better at accepting that reality recently, at least in the conversations I have, because a year ago, executive leaders were all in blind on AI. I would be asked about AI and then I follow up with, well, what would you like AI to do and that is where the conversation usually got really shallow and ended pretty quickly. The fact is, people didn’t know what it did or really even what they wanted it to do. Much less, how it would do it. They just knew that AI was going to take over the world and if you don’t have it, you will be on the losing side of the battle. I am glad to report and see that leaders are becoming aware of the fact that the gap between what the AI hype train said, and what AI actually does, is 2 pretty dramatically different things.
But, don’t take my word for it. I have a good friend and colleague that knows a lot about this stuff. His name is Brian Weber and he is VP at Gartner over Customer Service & Support and it is basically his job to know about these trends and what is actually going on in the customer service world. In a recent article he was quoted as saying that AI transformations “are not going as planned due to both the results and the unexpected costs.”
Brian goes on to say, “Customer service and support leaders expect cost savings from generative AI, but they often can underestimate the total cost of ownership, making savings difficult to realize”.
Brian said, “Customers want to be able to reach a human agent. Being able to reach a customer service employee was the second-highest priority for customers in a service interaction”.
Kind of the main theme of the conversation came when Brian said, “Our vendor evaluations reveal that an agentless contact center is not yet technically feasible, nor is it operationally desirable.”
I have first-hand knowledge of 2 different large logos whose names you would all know, who went all in on AI, and it lasted about 6 months before they basically pulled the plug on it and went back to good ol’ fashioned contact centers with humans.
But, look, this is really not a hit piece on AI. As I said, I think it is cool and useful.
My point is simply that AI Fatigue is real for me because there is an army of people out there that are doing nothing except talking every second of every day about how far behind you are if you are not all in on AI. You are not far behind. Your businesses are not going to fall off the side of the Earth. Should you look at AI, of course, but should you be convinced that you are a terrible person if you aren’t 1,000,000% in on AI, I am here to tell you that you are not.
