Published in Mainebiz, June 12, 2026
Anyone who has called a restaurant to book a table or to tell them you’re running late knows the experience.
It can be particularly frustrating to troubleshoot a product that arrived broken from a company where AI use is the dominant means for service.
Chances are, you didn’t speak to a person. You talked to a chatbot — and if you tried to reach a human, you may have found it nearly impossible.
This isn’t an accident. It’s the culmination of a decades-long structural shift in how companies think about customer service. The arc is familiar. In the 1990s and 2000s, companies offshored their service centers — first to India, then to the Philippines and beyond — chasing labor costs that were a fraction of domestic rates. Companies saved millions that way, but the quality varied enormously.