alt.hn

1/23/2026 at 10:57:44 AM

Ask HN: What 'AI feature' created negative ROI in production?

by kajolshah_bt

1/23/2026 at 11:41:38 AM

We implemented an AI-powered customer support triage system that initially looked promising in testing. In production, it actually increased our support costs by ~30% because:

The AI would confidently misroute 15-20% of tickets, requiring human review of ALL AI decisions and the Customers lost trust after a few bad experiences and started explicitly requesting human agents also Support agents spent more time correcting AI mistakes than they saved

The breaking point was data quality - our training data was too clean compared to real customer queries. We ended up rolling back to rule-based routing with AI as an optional suggestion tool instead.

by rtbruhan00

1/23/2026 at 12:08:52 PM

This is such a classic failure mode: even a 15–20% confident misroute is brutal because it forces “review everything,” kills trust, and increases repeats/reopens.

When you rolled back, did you keep AI as suggestions only + rules-based routing? And what metric exposed it fastest for you: recontact rate, handle time, or escalation to humans?

by kajolshah_bt

1/23/2026 at 11:49:05 PM

did you generate this reply with chatgpt or do you just naturally like to construct sentences like AI?

by Yiin

1/26/2026 at 1:25:55 PM

Even the OP was ChatGPT - he couldn’t even be bothered to remove the quote at the end.

by LEDThereBeLight