I needed help. What I got was a chatbot.
It started the same way it always does. I had an issue with a service, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I searched for an answer myself. I combed through the FAQ, clicked on links, skimmed through articles. No luck. Alright, time to contact support. That’s when my eyes focused on the chatbot icon. Maybe, I thought, it would be helpful. Maybe it would get me to a real person. Spoiler: It did not. Instead, it put me through a maze of automated responses, serving up the same FAQ pages I had already checked. Every attempt to get real help circled me back to square one. Finding an actual human? I probably would have more success winning the lottery. The Rise of Chatbots in Customer Service Chatbots weren’t always this...unhelpful. In fact, they started with promise. The earliest chatbot, ELIZA, was developed in the 1960s at MIT. It mimicked a psychotherapist, responding with simple rephrasings of user input. Revolutionary at the time, though in hindsight, it was about as helpfu...