Verizon ‘AI’ ‘Personal Shopper’ Assistant Ripping Customers Off With Weird Unwanted Charges
from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave dept
One recurring theme of our head-first rushed adoption of “AI” is that half-cooked automation routinely reflects the often shitty natures of the companies or individuals installing it.
Health insurance companies with a history of being crooks implement Medicare rejection AI with a 90% error rate. Incompetent media company executives implement half-cooked “AI” that plagiarizes, undercuts labor, and makes constant mistakes. Weird anti-science zealots who are routinely full of shit wind up issuing government reports full of absolute anti-science bullshit. Curious!
Over in telecom, Verizon has implemented automation in its customer support systems, and, once again, it directly reflects Verizon’s long history of terrible customer service, weird upcharges, and just generally being curiously terrible at math. The company’s new “Personal Shopper” AI assistant is ruffling customer feathers because it routinely adds unwanted features and constantly tries to rip customers off.
Reddit is full of posts like this one where users trying to make basic changes to their account using the tool routinely find themselves suddenly paying an arm and a leg for all sorts of services they neither wanted nor asked for:
“I went to the Verizon store to add a line and get a watch. I’m looking at my Verizon account and just noticed that the person assisting me added the 100GB of hot spot add on, Netflix & IMAX and insurance which I never asked for. All I wanted was the watch. I expected my bill to be $170-$180 but it’s $261 with all these add ons that I never asked for.”
Introduced last holiday season, Verizon insisted the new AI assistant would bring more joy and less stress to the experience with the telecom. But it’s clear that, in traditional Verizon fashion, the AI is being shaped to reflect Verizon’s endless efforts to upsell customers to more expensive plans, add-ons, and services. Even Verizon reps say they’re annoyed with the system, which makes their jobs harder:
“Anyone else who works for Verizon having issues with “Personal Shopper”?
I’m indirect and tried to place an order for an iPad yesterday, something that normally would take me like 5 minutes ended up being like 30 because I’m constantly fighting personal shopper wanting to add perks. Makes omni absolutely dog shit to use now.”
So automation that’s supposed to make customers’ and reps’ lives easier is actually making both experiences worse, and driving annoyed customers over to other wireless providers. Ironic that technology that’s supposed to revolutionize things seems to be simply supercharging many companies’ worst habits, adding new layers of annoyance and complexity.
Maybe Verizon should have spent less time kissing Trump’s ass to gain merger approval and more time fine tuning their AI assistants.
Filed Under: 5g, ai, assistant, customer service, telecom, wireless
Companies: verizon
Comments on “Verizon ‘AI’ ‘Personal Shopper’ Assistant Ripping Customers Off With Weird Unwanted Charges”
If you have a higher ed institution in your vicinity, I recommend contacting their IT/phone service department and checking if they can sell you plans directly even without a personal connection to the institution. I get to use Verizon’s infrastructure while paying something like $5/mo/phone, and they are prohibited from hassling me by raising or adding fees. There is strength in numbers when it comes to negotiation. Plus the university (probably) won’t be employing an AI agent to handle your request.
i am tot ally shocked. And stunned. :/
Sounds like the AI us working as intended. It’s over charging people and thus, line go up.
What, do you think the TRUMP admin is going to punish Verizon for exploiting customers?
On Point
This is so on point for Verizon. Would have expected nothing less from them.
Was a happy day when I was able to ditch my Verizon/Comcast Cable account.
If they kiss Trump’s ass enough, he’ll issue an executive order mandating Verizon’s Personal Shopper…
LLMs are not an “artificial intelligence,” they are a bullshit engines. pattern matching and stringing word tokens together based on the probabilities found from the training data doesn’t make them smart, it makes them a stochastic parrot at best. They still don’t know anything.
They don’t know know what’s factual or true, just what makes a sentence that sounds coherent, with a probability of being right- if the data sets those probabilities high enough.
It’s all just guesswork, raised to the level of bullshit because it never admits to that level of doubt.
Re:
Everyone knows that the word “intelligence” in the phrase “artificial intelligence” doesn’t mean “human quality intelligence”, and it never has, so all you’re doing here is showing a lack of basic knowledge of what the term “artificial intelligence” actually means.
Re: Re: AI
“It’s supposed to be shit.” That’s your clever response? You need to work on the real meaning of intelligence before you start to ponder the artificial….
Re: Re: Re:
Reading comprehension, che… Oh, wait. No.
Re: Re: Re:
TIL: The intelligence of non-human animals is shit. Thanks for proving your lack of empathy towards other species, I guess. Now please never get a pet. I don’t want to have to call out the local SPCA in your area to have them get you to sign the animal over to them.
Yes, should. In theory. Hypothetically. In a parallel universe.
Yes, spending time with family, loved ones, and random guys on internet that also hates Verizon.
Because of their long history of this, I did initially believe that Verizon had developed the Horizon crapware responsible for loads of subpostmasters/mistresses getting undeserved criminal records for dishonesty, rather than Fujitsu.
well
Does the AI also ‘accidentally’ add other items that verizon can’t sell, JUST at the point of clicking BUY?
Wouldn’t put it past them.
They’ve sold items to the extremely elderly via door to door abusive behaviour, patients that have been in comas for year suddenly getting settop-box/broadband bills etc etc.
Hell they’ve tried to bill the dead for BRAND NEW broadband accounts, insisting they get a cut of the estate, from people who’ve never EVER been a customer.
'A bug that makes us more money is a feature, not a bug.'
Strange how consistently the ‘mistakes’ seem to be on the ‘charge the customer more money’ side of things, I suspect if it was going the other way the company would be lightning quick in swapping back to the previous system as clearly something went horribly wrong.