I have deepseek agents doing email responses, with real tools (think running quotes, gathering info, scheduling things) and running business processes that used to be done by $35/hr administrative type people. And the capabilities are expanding every day as I learn how to build scaffolding around the model.
I am a tech lead for a useful but non-essential PaaS my company subscribes to. Their product manager occasionally sends me clearly AI-authored emails. I ignore them. I am a believer in the usefulness of AI, but nothing says I don’t care more clearly than sending me slop.
I can’t overstate how bad of an idea I think using an AI for customer interaction is.
I think it depends on the industry. In my company (insurtech) a large percentage of our sales come from AI engagements (phone and text). The customers know they're talking to an AI and they can elect to talk to a human at any time but many times they don't.
But yeah, send me a non solicited AI slop email or worse, political ad, and you dont get the dignity of me saying stop to unsubscribe. Straight to spam for you.
People have been trained to "press or say" a number while going through an AI voice menu on phones for over a decade. So a chatbot looks great by comparison in that context.
Optimum is probably using a middle ground: Use AI to do all preparations like suggesting quotes, gathering background about the customers query etc but then have the human write the email for personal touch. Still much faster than doing it all by hand.
