OK, but UA has barely bothered to put a rudimentary phone tree in place. Instead, they've focused on making their self-service web / app tools as good as possible -- arguably industry-leading. AI has its uses, but I'm really not sure phone-based customer service will ever be one of them. Chatbots? Sure, because the chatbot can just bail and say "please connect to a human." But, natural language processing is challenging enough without adding speech recognition over a relatively low-quality audio feed. Text is much simpler than speech.

This latest round of AI-mania has been fueled by large language model tools like ChatGPT. But LLMs would be particularly poorly suited as customer service reps -- they're great for spewing massive amounts of text from a human prompt, but they're less great for actually having that text be meaningful or accurate.

As far as customer service goes, the type of thing that AI might be able to do in the near future, can be done better, today, without AI. Flight status? Phone tree. Reservations? Phone tree. Change to a reservation? Phone tree, and then stay on hold for the rate desk. Etc. You don't need, or want, to have a conversation about unladen swallows with your customer service rep -- you just want to accomplish a task.

Online -- I'd have believed it, but 25 years ago I was a CS major. On an app? No way, that's Star Trek.

Oh, sure, but that's a much, much different problem. The role of AI in the airlines is in Revenue Management, where I suspect they're already using it to a great degree. That's because neural nets are really good at detecting patterns, near real-time, in large amounts of data that humans might miss, so something like RM is a perfect fit. But neural nets are a 30-year-old technology.

The word "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

 

Big time

Yeah, NNs are 30 years old, but figuring out where they could be used productively in some industries took time.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arti...neural_network

This is indeed interesting. Yet the greatest limitation on the expansion of overseas call centers may well be potential union contractual limitations alluded to above in Post # 10.

However, simple geography and time-zone issues will mean there is always a place for international call centers.