While there are many cases where call center staff are told by customers to 'call a human, not an AI,' there are also opinions that 'AI is better'

AI is developing rapidly, and AI capable of natural voice conversations without sounding like a robot has appeared. Meanwhile, human call center staff are increasingly being told by customers to 'switch to a human instead of an AI.'
As AI Infiltrates Call Centers, Human Workers Are Being Mistaken for Bots - Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-27/as-ai-infiltrates-call-centers-human-workers-are-being-mistaken-for-bots
Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI - Slashdot
https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/28/1740215/call-center-workers-are-tired-of-being-mistaken-for-ai
The video below shows a real-time conversation with Gemini, which shows how it responds to human questions with accurate answers and short latency.
Asking for a recipe while interacting with AI in the Gemini app - YouTube
As mentioned above, AI's voice conversation capabilities have reached a certain level, and there are several technology companies that are actually developing 'services that allow AI to take over call center operations.' However, at the time of writing, the vast majority of call centers still have human agents, and in a survey of 163 companies conducted by Gartner, 95% of companies responded that they would 'continue to use human agents.'
However, Jessica Lindsay, who works as a call center representative for American Express, told Bloomberg, 'About two years ago, I started hearing more and more people say, 'I want to talk to a real person,' or, 'Are you an AI?'' According to Lindsay, she sometimes hears repeated commands to the AI, such as, 'Speak to a representative!'
In order to show that he is not an AI, Lindsay tries to make 'human-like sounds that AI cannot reproduce,' such as 'clearing his throat' and 'laughing.' However, when Lindsay starts reading out the standard answer phrases, users mistake them for AI responses and get angry, and eventually hang up the phone.

After Bloomberg's report, many opinions were posted on the community site Slashdot along the lines of 'It's better to have an AI respond than a human' and 'Human call center agents are on the same level as AI.' For example, one user commented, 'It should be an honor to be mistaken for an AI. Call center agents are nothing more than an obstacle between the 'user' and the 'small number of employees authorized to actually help the user.'' In addition, 'Call center agents are instructed to follow a conditional branching manual to standardize customer satisfaction, and they cannot answer questions that are outside the script, and they act like automatons that only follow the script. Few people would be surprised if you mixed AI into the call center agents.'
in Software, Posted by log1o_hf