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A few months ago, my fiancée and I splurged on a pair of ebikes. We live in an especially hilly area of Atlanta, which is an especially hilly city, and we’d both just gotten bonuses at work, making the nearly $2,000 per bike feel, for a moment, digestible.
We placed our orders online, and days later, my fiancée’s beautiful, feature-rich bike arrived at our door. Mine, bought separately from a different retailer, was delayed, then delayed again, and again.
Finally, one Wednesday evening, I got a text from FedEx confirming that my bike had been delivered to our address and signed for. This seemed impossible, considering that when the text arrived, I was standing in my kitchen, bicycle-less, air-frying a batch of chicken thighs.
I checked outside our apartment; my package wasn’t there. So, I checked my order confirmation, only to learn the bike had been signed for by someone with the mysterious initials “M.M.,” which don’t match those of myself, my fiancée, or anyone in our building. Whether it was stolen, misplaced, or delivered to the wrong address didn’t matter as much as finding a solution. I set out to do that the following day by calling FedEx's customer service line for help.
What followed was a monthslong descent into the bowels of customer service hell, during which I spent hours in virtual, chatbot-governed waiting rooms—with FedEx, the bicycle company, my bank, my credit card company, and even my local police department—desperately trying to find a real, living person who would speak to me, let alone solve my $2,000 problem.
The New “Sludge”
Perhaps the strangest thing about my situation is how incredibly normal it has become. In recent years, corporations have employed artificial intelligence with a particular verve in their customer service arms, often at the cost of human employees.
In a survey of customer service leaders published in April, 31 percent said they have already reduced or are planning to reduce headcount due to AI adoption. A majority of the surveyed leaders say they are shifting their human agents into new roles or adding new tasks to their workload rather than simply laying them off.
Some leaders have been more brazen, though. Verizon CEO Dan Schulman recently told Bloomberg that AI will likely replace a “large percentage” of the company’s customer service work, noting that it’s one of the business sectors most exposed to changes brought on by the technology.
For consumers like myself, this has led to a less human, more acute version of the demoralizing wait times, on-hold music, and non-answers that have characterized bad customer service for decades. What’s more, these systems are sometimes employed intentionally, via an industry tactic known as “sludge,” in an attempt to discourage customers seeking resolution.
As Ryan Hamilton, a marketing professor and consumer psychology researcher at Emory University, points out, AI has simply given sludge a new face.
“Sludge existed before AI,” Hamilton says. “But AI, like with everything else, has just sort of ramped up the dystopian nature of it.”
Whether it’s due to organically bad experiences, intentional sludge, or some combination of both, it’s clear that shoppers are not happy with the state of AI-led customer service. In a report published in May and featuring consumers from the US, UK, and Canada, 59 percent said they were frustrated with AI customer service agents. Meanwhile, 85 percent said they’d prefer to speak with a real person.
My Personal Chatbot Hell
When my ebike went missing, nearly every phone call led me to a chatbot, with FedEx’s AI agents often ignoring my requests to speak with a human representative.
Even my local police department made the dilemma more inhuman. When I called them to file a missing property report, I was prompted to leave my information with a chatbot and wait for an officer to contact me back.
Ultimately, I tried to file two police reports: one over the phone and one via the department’s website. The first time, I never heard back. The second time, I got a call back, but it came during a work meeting, so I missed it. There was no voicemail, and when I tried to return the call, I found myself, again, in the same chatbot-run waiting room.
So I went the corporate route again. I wrangled FedEx into opening a claim for my missing bike, although the company resolved it over email with an automated message to say that my bike was, in fact, missing—but that I’d have to contact the shipper for any restitution.
When I called the bike company, I was able to bypass its online chatbot and get a real person on the phone. In the end, though, the best they could do was convince FedEx to compensate me for the shipping, which was a measly one-tenth of the total amount I spent.
Then, I tried appealing the purchase via my bank and my card company, but both led me through long, chatbot-filled rabbit holes that ended with one human, finally, telling me they couldn’t help me, since the package was technically lost on FedEx’s watch.
Sunk Cost
Though it’s afforded gobs of hype, agentic AI is still in its infancy; Meta’s Toolformer, a model that was considered groundbreaking for its ability to call upon external tools when in doubt, is just three years old. In my situation, a better chatbot may have directed my calls to the right person, or, given the amount of shipping data FedEx has at its disposal, it might have even tracked down my bike.
What remains to be seen, though, is whether corporations can employ more advanced tools to the benefit of the consumer.
Hamilton says that some companies adopt technologies like agentic AI customer service bots without a full appreciation of how much they’ll negatively affect the customer experience.
“Sometimes they’re aware,” he says. “They’re willing to accept that trade-off.”
While companies in some industries can afford to get away with poor customer service, Hamilton says, others cannot. And in a world where AI-led consumer interaction is increasingly the norm, executives will have to find other ways to differentiate themselves, potentially through better service.
There’s a risk these changes are “smoothing out the service dimension,” he says, “where everyone is going to have the same AI call center, no matter what industry you’re in.”
Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale and the director of the school’s Center for Customer Insights, told me he sees a kind of sunk-cost fallacy driving AI implementation across several business sectors, not just customer service. Global spending on AI tools is expected to ramp up sharply this year, potentially leaving many leaders pot-committed to their implementation, even if things aren’t going as planned.
“If you’re a CEO,” Dhar says, “you’re getting questions from all of the investors, from Wall Street, like, ‘Hey, what is your AI strategy, first of all, and is it showing any return on investment? You’re spending all this money.’”
Hamilton believes many companies are making decisions based on “optimism,” assuming an all-in approach to AI chatbots will eventually pay off. In the meantime, though, they could be inadvertently damaging their reputations with bad service.
“They kind of assume that AI will catch up, or it won’t be that bad,” he said. “And it can, in some circumstances, be quite bad.”
During my ebike saga, I was immensely annoyed by the chatbots themselves. More so, I was annoyed by the fact that no one seemed to care that I was stuck with them. This idea, that a corporation could hide, intentionally or unintentionally, behind a wall of under-equipped AI tools, was a tough pill to swallow.
Nearly three months later, my bike and I are still trapped in chatbot hell. FedEx never found my package, I was never reimbursed beyond the shipping fees, and I’m still out around $1,700.
When reached for comment, the Atlanta Police Department told me they had in fact dispatched an officer to my place the day I missed a call from them, and promised to send one again. They did, however, also confirm that when they called me on the phone, it was an operator who called, not an officer, and that returning these calls sends you back to the chatbot-run non-emergency line.
When I asked FedEx to comment, the company sent a statement that reads in part: “While we leverage AI and digital tools to offer fast, convenient self-service for everyday questions, we recognize that complex situations require human care and deeper support. We use technology to amplify our team members’ ability to deliver the Purple Promise. We are continuously refining our processes so that customers can get the assistance they need seamlessly and swiftly.”
At the start of this journey, it seemed impossible that I’d leave that much money on the table. But now, after endless hours of dealing with AI agents, which often felt intentionally designed to gatekeep a real, human interaction, the chatbots are starting to wear me down.
