The Need for Autonomous Agents in Customer Support

If it's your job/duty to offer some assistance or help to me as a customer, then why do you get angry or frustrated at me when I come to get said help? You see this happening a lot, and at least at some point, you've encountered something like this.

The reason I'm talking about this is the importance or the ability for self-assistance in the physical world. Robotics have been already doing this for some time. For example, some shops no longer have people at the tills, but you can go there, scan your items and pay. Queuing services as well, just get to the building, operate a kiosk and get a turn number.

Applications are already good at doing that, but now, there's room for much more improvements with AI. We can now add more abilities to agents we create that can effectively assist people instantly without any hassle. If someone can't do something on a service, then an agent should be available to help that person with whatever query they might have.

Chat bot assistants have a way of doing so but that's not enough. The best they do is give you information, and more likely where to find it. We now have to think beyond that. We now have to consider fully capable, autonomous agents embedded on every site, every screen, every kiosk and on public facing services for people to get instant assistance and satisfaction, with options for escalation.

The other day, I was using Linear to manage my tasks, and move them around. They have an agent that can be of help, and I was using that. Instead of trying to understand the UI and click things around, the agent was doing that for me. All I have to do is "Add a task about XYZ, on project due in 3 days". That's it, the agent will do it.

This is now what we should consider when designing software. UIs can be complicated, and learning one sometimes might be overwhelming and having an agent to assist you along the process can be/will be a game changer.