Refundron and Botimus Prime are arriving to battle the scourge of the AI customer service bots
Prepare for bot-on-bot warfare across the automated wastelands of customer care
AI-enabled customer service is merely the continuation of commerce by other means
Among the scammiest claims about AI today is the idea that it can “delight” customers by handling service requests, complaints and support interactions. This is demonstrably false on both a quantitative and qualitative level. A growing body of research — including surveys from SurveyMonkey, YouGov and others — shows customers overwhelmingly prefer competent humans to AI service bots, especially when dealing with stressful, ambiguous or high-stakes problems.
Furthermore, literally anyone exposed to AI-driven customer care already knows its true rationale has very little to do with customer happiness. It has to do with:
Saving money by pink-slipping human operators, and
Making it harder for customers who want a refund to actually get a refund.
That is the real business logic driving much of this wave of automation.
For telecom operators, this is immensely dangerous territory – the land that satisfied customers forgot.
A profound contradiction is emerging at the heart of the telecom industry’s AI narrative. Operators increasingly market themselves as trusted AI-era infrastructure providers — sovereign-network partners, cybersecurity guardians and the control layer of the coming AI economy.
And they are right that connectivity is becoming as critical as electricity or water. AI systems, factories, cloud platforms and autonomous machines will all depend on networks.
But don’t tell me you’re building the network stack of the next AI-enabled digital industrial revolution while simultaneously trapping me inside AI customer-service purgatory with cheerful chatbots, scripted loops, repeated authentication, godawful muzak and zero escalation path — human or otherwise.
People clearly hate it.
But never mind them. I hate it.
And my loathing only grows with each exposure to AI-driven support systems that are as dehumanizing as they are deliberately obstructive.
So here’s a suggestion: rather than using AI bots solely to devastate loyal employees’ lives through layoffs while infuriating customers, telcos should lean into a new class of “consumer defense bots” as a potentially massive new business opportunity.
There is little doubt consumers would pay a modest — or perhaps not so modest — fee for an autonomous bot capable of taking on companies that make modern life miserable. Marketing these bots with aggressive, militaristic branding would almost certainly become central to the business model – especially in the U.S.
These wouldn’t be mere consumer bots, in the same way a great white shark isn't a pet goldfish. They would be tactical attack bots. They’ll have cool names, like Refundron, Botimus Prime, Sub-Scrapper and curseyouunitedhealthgroup.
You could “arm” (not equip) them from a software menu of strategic offensive capabilities to go after your corporate tormentors.
Seriously, like anyone wouldn’t pay a serious auto-renewing subscription fee to get their hands on a weapons-grade “Second-Dan Killbot” with Level 3 cyber-defense capability, right?
Sadly, we will have to wait a couple of years for the first generation of consumer-defense bots to arrive. AI isn’t nearly as smart as people think it is, and the autonomous capabilities needed to handle the real-world — albeit virtual — ambiguity of these tasks are still well beyond the current state of the art.
Which leaves two options: wait until the technology catches up, or simply release the dogs of war by launching a bunch of poorly trained, partially functional, cyberpsychotically aggressive bots onto an unsuspecting internet and its utterly ill-prepared corporations.
I’m all in on Plan B.
Let’s kill all the transactions and let God sort them out.
Stephen M. Saunders MBE is a communications analyst and USPTO-registered inventor examining how digital infrastructure — 5G, cloud, and AI — is reshaping industry, power and society, as well as underpinning the emerging, ubiquitous global digital economy. As anchor of FNTV and a longtime industry insider, he focuses less on growth narratives and more on execution, risk and how hyperscale technology is distorting markets, governance and society at scale.
Opinion pieces from industry experts, analysts or our editorial staff do not represent the opinions of Fierce Network.