Jason M. Lemkin and a colleague share frustrating encounters with AI customer support agents that pushed unnecessary upsells, suggested credits users didn't have, and gave vague pricing answers. They warn that AI agents require constant training and human oversight to avoid steering customers toward unwanted costs.
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I sent it to both, like all the folks I know there and was like, you know, just this double handicap of it trying to charge me more, use a more pricier model, then you raising prices, then the agent telling me I had to upgrade to get something done, which wasn't actually even true, right? It just told me to— it just made that recommendation. It's also telling me to use credits I didn't have to use. I was like, you may want to look into this because I don't know if other people would be as patient. I don't know if they'd say, hey, this is mission critical, I got to get it done. I'm going to use the credits and pay the extra cost. Like, I feel as a customer, like I stuck with it, but I think other folks would be fairly frustrated. And so it's just a reminder for the folks listening, right? Like, I don't want you guys to ever— and we're sometimes in the situation too, to Jason's point, like we're sometimes on the reverse side of this where with our agents it is a lot of maintenance, it is a lot of training to keep it up to date. But because they hadn't trained their sculptor fully through every scenario, which I know is tedious, right? It's totally tedious. Like, that's why. But that's the job. But that's why it was trying to get me down this upsell upgrade path when it didn't need to.
Yeah, it was another example. Then let's move on to the next topic. I was, I was using the AI agent on HubSpot's website on the homepage, right? Massive traffic, right?
Yeah. Massive.
Trying to get a pricing quote for what HubSpot would cost at our scale. I just could not get an intelligent answer.
Oh yeah, I remember this.
I don't know whether it was now. Now it might have been because they, they really want you to talk to a human. I think that was part of it. But it could have been better trained. And so all these stories are that some of the best folks, Clay here, to a smaller extent HubSpot, to others, like AI support is great, AI agents are great, but someone, you gotta read a segment of these chats every day.
