When will customers balk at automation?
Ordering and retrieving a meal without any human interaction is already a reality. What’s still looming is that point where a kiosk or app user says, “Ah, to deal with a person again!”
We never got to that point with banks, where ATMs are the established and apparently preferred way of handling routine interactions. But think about calling a help center and working through a telephone tree of canned questions and responses, when dealing with a thinking, hearing, speaking human would have been so much quicker and less vexing.
When will we get to the point where non-artificial intelligence will be appreciated as an enhancement to an experience, a topspin on good service?
Maybe not in 2018, but we’ll see.