I Don’t Want to Talk to an AI Agent – The Idiocy of AI Chatbots as Corporate Gatekeepers

I don’t understand why companies are hell-bent on forcing AI voice assistants down consumers’ throats. For cases that need regular requests, the standard agents work fine. But for cases requiring specialized support, it never works and it takes so much time to get to a human. It almost drives everyone crazy—at least, it did that to me.

This whole story started when my internet went down.

The Outage

My internet died on a Tuesday. And I instantly knew this was not a regular “pull the plug and try restarting” kind of situation. I did all the basic troubleshooting that I knew tech support was going to ask me about, and it did not work. Then I started searching for customer service, and the first one I had to go through was Giga Spectrum AI assistant.

Most of the time, you can answer some basic questions and get to a human. Not this time. I had to go through multiple questions and, in the end, I was no closer to getting a resolution. Then I called customer service, and you had the same experience. After multiple agent answers, I was finally able to reach a human. Oh, this is awesome. And then the agent went ahead with the same questions and the same troubleshooting steps. After explaining that yes, I had already done this, the agent asked me to do the same thing again. And then the connection dropped.

I had to start the whole thing again—call customer service, get to a human, and do the whole rigmarole once more. At the end, the agent insisted it was my router, which was more than eight years old. They said they would send an Aero agent. I asked them, “Can I get it myself for now, since I had to work from home?” and the answer was yes.

So I went out to Best Buy, got one, and came back. I tried to set it up with no luck. Back to customer service, back to the same rigmarole. Then the agent came back and said our Aero routers come with a specific configuration and a regular one will not work. At this time, I was so irritated with the whole thing. I asked them what the solution was, and they said they would ship the router as fast as possible.

I was pretty sure it would not work, so I asked them for someone to come and check my connection. The answer was that the service visit would be in two days’ time, as I needed to wait for the router to arrive.

That was the moment I decided to leave Spectrum. Not because the internet broke—internet breaks, I get it—but because when it broke, the company treated me like a nuisance to be processed rather than a customer to be helped. The absurdity of forcing a grown adult to go through chat agents for permission to speak to a human or technician is the kind of thing that makes you question what people are smoking when deciding how to set up customer service practices.

Why I Switched to Verizon

I switched to Verizon. Not because their internet is necessarily better, but because I was able to walk into a Verizon store, stand in front of a counter, and speak to a human being who exists in three-dimensional space and can make decisions without consulting a decision tree. They sent me a tech the same day who crawled below my house, found that the line was cut, and set up a new line. I was online by the end of the day.

And the cherry on the cake? I had to wait for the new router to arrive for me to be able to cancel the service visit and return the equipment to UPS.

Then Domino’s Happened

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. You’d think I would have understood that this is how things are going to be. I use AI in my professional work and my side preojects, and it is something hugely helpful to me. Hell I even use AI to proof read and give me comments on how to structure tmy writing. So I am an AI optimist and i was hopeful on AI usage, but that hope died on a Friday when the Domino’s App went down.

See, my son is autistic, and his weekly treat is a Domino’s pizza. We have been going to the same place, and the routine is the same. That is his reward. We go to Dollar Tree, and I order his pizza on the app when we reach there. He shops for some items, and then we go to pick up the pizza.

Not that Friday. The app went down, and a chatbot answered.

Not a person. Not even a person pretending to be busy. A chatbot. On the phone. I had called a pizza place to order a pizza, and a chatbot picked up. It was not even to redirect me; it said very confidently, “I can take your order.” I could not get to a human. I am an Indian guy who speaks English with an accent. I think it is not too bad, but that chatbot could hardly understand what I was asking for. I tried pressing zero, tried saying “agent,” and after what felt like an eternity, I was finally able to get someone at the store.

The Pattern

Here’s what these companies don’t seem to understand: the chatbot isn’t helping. It’s not “deflecting” simple queries so humans can handle complex ones. It’s putting up a digital wall—a wall filled with friction and nonsense, designed to make customers give up before they reach someone.

And the insulting part is that everyone likes to proclaim their AI initiatives as game-changing, and most cases, it is not. Someone higher up picked up an AI initiative to reduce costs and decided that customer service was the easiest part to automate and remove humans from the equation. I am not saying do not use AI, but can they not be mindful about how you use AI? You can use AI to automate systems that help customer service and build better systems for them.

The Domino’s situation is arguably worse because it’s so unnecessary. Spectrum is a telecom company; I accept that their support infrastructure is a labyrinth of despair already. But Domino’s is a pizza chain. I wasn’t calling to dispute my loan charges. I was calling about bread and cheese. The level of automation they’ve applied to what should be a thirty-second conversation is like using Thor’s hammer to open a bag of chips. It’s overkill, and it makes the experience measurably worse for everyone involved—including the human employees who have to deal with customers who’ve just been driven mad by its AI bot.

What We’re Losing

There’s a broader point here about what we’re giving up in exchange for efficiency that isn’t actually efficient. When I call a business, I’m not just trying to transmit information from my brain to their database. I’m trying to have a human interaction. I’m trying to explain the weird edge case that doesn’t fit the FAQ. I’m trying to say, “Look, I’ve already done the basic stuff; I need someone who can think,” and have the person on the other end actually think. I shudder to think what some one experiences when they call in for a critical medical or healthcare question and have to go through a similar rigmarole with a voice AI Agent.

Chatbots can’t think. They can pattern-match. They can retrieve. They can simulate empathy. But they can’t look at a situation and say, “This is weird; let me figure it out.” They can’t say, “You know what, you’re right; our system screwed up, and here’s how I’m going to fix it.” They can’t do the one thing that customer service is actually for: acknowledging that the human on the other end of the line is, in fact, a human.

So I switched to Verizon, where I can walk into a store. And I’m probably going to stop calling Domino’s, because life’s too short to argue with a robot about pepperoni. If these companies want to know why they’re bleeding customers, they should ask their AI chatbots. It will probably ask them to unplug the router and try again.

To top this all off, Spectrum sent me a mail after I cancelled, saying that since I have been with them for ten years, I am eligible for a discounted plan. Great guys, did you not pick that up when I called you originally?

It makes me wonder what world we are building for ourselves and for the people who work in it. Build responsibly: build for the people that live in this world, not just for filling up your bottom lines.