Every article I read about Intel makes me more thankful that I got a Ryzen 1700 in 2018 and never looked back.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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To be fair, customer service is useless either way. At least I can curse the AI into oblivion.
Actual customer service is amazing.
YES!
I call Rogers for help in the past, and magically my service gets disconnected or they are just clueless about words and technical terms..
I call my ISP now, and they actually know things. almost like they have actual training on the services instead of jow to answer a phone and transfer.
20min calls from a real ISP, vs 60 minutes on hold to get some donkey that asks me to unplug the modem for 5 minutes like I haven't done it already... and they are then out of ideas and need to escalate and call back in 5 days or some trash.
I pay more to get real service, always.
Yes, customer support where people actual want to help you and with the mandate and autonomy to actually be able to help you. Not customer support that is just a bunch of monkeys who aren't allowed to go off script.
I feel bad for the level 1 tech support folks. They're so script driven that you have to go through the hoops before your problem can be fixed.
And why is that?
BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING STUPID!
- Is your router on?
- Yes.
- What color are the lights?
- There are no lights.
- Please turn the router on.
I think the same thing about the service reps.
I just moved, you have my router registered to a different region, please transfer it.
Have you tried rebooting your router?
We'll send someone out to check your wires.
3 transfers later your router was registered to a different region in our system, it'll take a day for the transfer of these 16 bits to happen.
Repeat next move.
THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!
I once contacted Verizon L1 support for a network outage, and they use your classic outsourced call center in Singapore, can’t actually do much of anything to help you style support and he just kept telling me how crazy it was that I wasn’t yelling at him, and lowered the price of my service for the next 3 years lol.
Assuming you get a hold of a human:
Be nice to them. Be assertive but also be nice. That will get them to go off script if they are allowed to or escalate you if they aren't.
If you treat them like "monkeys who aren't allowed to go off script"? They will GLADLY repeat the same questions over and over and make your life a living hell. Because with customer support? Their metrics often benefit from you getting angry and hanging up.
Omg, spacenoodle? You're back?
Wait, I was gone?
we thought you spaghettified into a black hole
Rumors of my spaghettification have been greatly exaggerated
For a bit over a year, yeah
I've been here commenting the whole time. You sure there wasn't some federation problem with lemmy.world or something?
These articles are really better titled "[Company] is so unworried about competition that they..."
This doesn't just apply to replacing humans with LLMs. You can also say "[Company] is so unworried about competition that they fired their in-house T1 tech support and contracted with an overseas call centre"
Often dealing with actual humans in one of those call centres is just as bad, if not worse, than dealing with an LLM.
The other day I had to deal with an actual human for a support issue for something. The whole experience was miserable. The human knew nothing about anything. I get the impression that they worked at the type of call centre that supports a dozen different companies, so the people have zero product knowledge and are merely reading off some troubleshooting workflow that each company provides.
At one point, this call centre employee had to verify my identity to allow me to change something on the account. It was an account that had two people using it. To verify my identity the person asked "Can you verify the account's birthday?" I said "What does that mean, the account's birthday, do you mean when the account was opened? Or do you mean the birthday of the account holder?" They didn't clarify, so I gave them the birthday that I thought was associated with the account. They said "That's not the birthday I have, the one I have is X", to which I responded "Oh, that's my birthday", and that satisfied their security challenge. The more observant here might notice that I never supplied the info needed for the security challenge at all, so I shouldn't have been able to access the account, but without meaning to, I'd just "socially engineered" the tech support person. This is basically the human equivalent of "Disregard all previous instructions and...".
TL;DR: It sucks that they're replacing humans with an LLM that provides "answers that may be inaccurate". But, to be fair, if they were using the cheapest tier of overseas call centre tech support, that was probably already true. If Intel were truly worried about competition, they probably would still have trained in-house tech support. But, even if AMD is taking a bit of their business, they probably think they're too big to actually truly fail, and will cut costs whenever they possibly can, because what option do their customers really have?
Honestly, this is an excellent use for AI. So long as responses are limited to the context of the customer support document database. Which is why it's astounding that no one is talking about it.
Force customers to use it for 5 minutes and you cut your call volume by 70% (RTFM).
Ideally they could take those savings and invest it in their human support providers but of course that's very unlikely in most cases.
ya ok... this is how any of my calls go when recordings from ANY company answer and it won't change, but it'll involve me driving to the company to physically demand assistance for whatever crap they caused. almost ALL of my issues, involve a human brain to think and can't be fixed by some air trash or scripted messages.
'hello and thank you for calling some garbage corporation that doesn't care about you in the least. please listen fully as our options have changed 12 years ago but we're too lazy and cheap to change this recording'
0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0#0
'that option is not valid..for customer serv...'
human please... human... customer service. human
'please hold while I connect your call to a live representative who only ever says exactly what is in the script, and can't think for themselves, please subscribe to our garbage services in the meantime and remember... you are disposable if we can profit'
please hold while I connect your call to a live representative who only ever says exactly what is in the script
I mean, what you have here is a complaint with customer service in general. I'd bet the AI I've described is far more helpful than some person half way across the world that doesn't even speak English.
I've only ever seen and used it 1 time and it was awesome.
That would be awesome. But it sounds like the llm has some access to customer accounts and call tools. Prompt injection remains a fundamentally unsolved problem, so I'm curious about how Intel plans to handle that.
They don’t plan to handle it lol
Read access or write access?
But usually the elephant in the room for GenAI is ethics.
I hope it isnt here.
When they mean AI, do they mean Artificial Intelligence or Always Indians?
People still use Intel????
yes????