Zendesk launched a campaign to advertise its “self-improving AI agents.” The catchline is: “Want to talk to a human? Call your mom.”

The opposite of “call your mom” is what we’re trying to build at Automattic. Not a support experience where you have to jump through hoops to chat to a human, but one where AI helps make the experience better. I wrote about this a year ago.

Zendesk’s marketing team probably wanted to be funny. They probably wanted to provoke a smile indicating that human interactions in support will no longer be necessary now that they have self-improving AI agents.

With this, they show what philosophy they are trying to optimise for, and it’s far from the type of support experience we try to create at Automattic: respectful and catered to customer needs.

Don’t get me wrong, we also focus on ways to improve our AI tools and bots. Some of that is done manually — our customer facing bot is called “Odie” and in Woo we have a group of Happiness Engineers called the “Odie Whisperers” who review its quality. Some of that we try to automate.

But our goal is never to eliminate human-to-human interactions from the process. If anything, we teach Odie to identify faster when the customer will only hear what we have to say if they’re confident a human is listening.

Two of my team members are even exploring the option of a three-way chat where the customer sees both Odie and the support engineer in the same window. There are certain things Odie can do faster and better than us, but we want to make sure that there’s also a human touch. I already highlighted this in my WooSesh talk in 2023 as a future direction, and we haven’t changed our mind.

We rely heavily on Odie, and Odie has gotten very good at answering questions (in more than 90% of its replies the quality is good), but our point is not to block access to humans altogether. Our point is to create the best possible customer experience. Sometimes that’s getting an instant reply from a bot. In other cases, that’s knowing that a human is in control and taking a deep look at your problem. And — as we’re exploring — sometimes, that needs to be both.

By all means, go call your mom if you can, but also come chat to a human at Automattic.