Customer Support Looks Easy. That's Why AI Can't Crack It.
At softly, we tried to automate customer support for clinics. The AI part worked — FAQs, multi-step lookups, even reasoning about clinic policies. The support part didn't.
People don't message a clinic to ask what's on the website. They want someone who knows the things the website doesn't say — can this procedure fix my specific case, will it hurt more than last time, if I'm combining two procedures which order matters — and who can solve their problem right now.
Each question is an edge case. Getting one wrong isn't just bad service — a hallucinated answer about a procedure is dangerous. Generalization and hallucination come from the same place.
But even accurate answers weren't enough. The job was conversion — turning that anxious inquiry into a patient who actually walks through the door. Every rule we wrote implied ten more we hadn't thought to write. The gap never closed.
Coding agents already ship features[1]. Design tools generate layouts from prompts. Customer support looks like the obvious next step — text-based work, recognizable patterns[2]. In 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2020, customers would manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human[3]. Fifteen years later, the job still exists.