Last year Verizon introduced generative AI into its app and retail experiences for customers and employees alike to benefit from. One year on and it seems that the consensus among
Verizon representatives is that these AI tools — Personal Shopper and Problem Solver — just make their jobs even harder.Both tools are supposed to analyze the profile of the customer that a representative is currently dealing with and provide custom-tailored help. However what Personal Shopper keeps doing instead is adding perks and other extras that the employees then have to remove before going back to what needs doing.
Verizon marketed the tools as something that would help both customers and employees reduce the time it takes to resolve a standard problem. AI would match a Verizon user with the representative that it thinks would be perfect for said user’s specific needs. This sounds really good in theory but some Verizon employees claim that the company is misusing these tools to make up for lost subscribers.
Modern AI models — though fascinating technology — are usually met with resistance whenever they’re introduced somewhere. This is usually because these AI models still cannot replicate a human perfectly and also often mean multiple people losing their jobs. The same sentiment is shared amongst
Verizon employees who angrily proclaimed that AI needed to go.This also reminds me of T-Mobile’s app T-Life.
T-Mobile recently started making it mandatory for customers and employees to use T-Life. This was a very contentious decision as many users still claim that the app is a broken mess. The AI problem is similar because T-Life and
Verizon’s AI tools are meant to eventually phase out the retail experience entirely but both solutions have problems.
Verizon employees are currently having to tolerate using the AI tools because they don’t really have any other options. Some have even found a small workaround that makes it a bit easier to resolve a problem quicker without having the AI keep adding unwanted extras.
As AI continues to seep into every aspect of our lives we can expect many more similar stories in the future. It doesn’t matter how intelligent an AI model may be if it’s told to do something that the user may not have asked for.
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