Work · the new colleague
AI in customer-facing roles
30-second gist~30s read
If you do customer-facing work — support, sales, healthcare reception, banking, frontline anything — AI is now suggesting your replies in real time. Used well, it cuts your response time in half. Used badly, it makes you sound like everyone else and gets you in trouble.
The honest framing: it's a colleague who's read everything and met no one. You're the one who's met the customer.
If you want more
Where AI assistance is genuinely good
- Pulling the right policy, FAQ, or article fast.
- Drafting the boring middle of a long reply.
- Translating across languages on the fly.
- Summarising a long ticket history for the next agent.
- Watching for distress in customer language.
Where it goes wrong
- Over-formal apologies that don't sound like a real person — feels evasive.
- Wrong facts from a confused knowledge base, sent verbatim.
- Promises the company can't keep — refunds, exceptions, escalation timelines.
- Loss of memory across sessions that the customer remembers fully.
Read the AI suggestion. Take what's useful. Rewrite it in your own voice before sending. The customer didn't get in touch to talk to your knowledge base — they got in touch to talk to a person who could help.