Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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Feb 15, 2025 07:16 PM
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Should customer support replies have an "AI" label if the reply came from an AI agent?
All the recent research says it shouldn't. But right now, almost all AI replies in any tool have a label. Companies are worried they're being dishonest if they don't. They might feel their customers have the right to know.
But why? Why do they need to know whether that reply was entirely generated by an AI agent?
- They wouldn't label it if it was drafted with AI but sent by a human.
- They wouldn't label it if it came from their most or least experienced support agent.
I'm sure we'll look back in a few years and be surprised this was even debated. Because the main goal of the customer support department is to resolve customer's questions and issues as quickly and effectively as possible, all whilst maintaining empathy for the customer. How this is achieved shouldn't matter.
I don't care if a CGI scene in a film is 100% human, 50:50 AI:human or 100% AI. If the scene is good, it's good.
The University of Virginia recently did a study on which replies user's preferred. The majority preferred the AI's replies, but they preferred them much less when they knew it was AI. This makes sense as people want validation that their answer came from a human.
We see this all the time in customer support. A customer gets an answer from our AI agent, asks to speak to a person, only to receive the same reply from the human, which resolves their issue.
So should we keep labeling things as "AI generated"? Or does it not matter as long as it's doing the job.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
