Companies bringing in AI and automated customer service are taking us for a ride | David Penberthy

Robots selling wine, jobs being outsourced to computers and face-to-face service as rare as hen’s teeth. David Penberthy bemoans what the world is coming to, and with good reason.

A couple of nights ago – bang on tea time of course – I received a phone call from a guy called Matt, from a company called the Wine Concierge.

Many readers will be familiar with Matt. He’s not a real person of course. He’s a computer-generated AI chatbot whose company has harvested thousands of private phone numbers and rings people at inconvenient times trying to sell them wine.

Matt has been programmed to answer different commonly used sentences and speaks with a friendly tone in a broad Australian accent.

He has been designed to come across as jocular and real, but still sounds modular and clunky enough to be the obvious work of artificial intelligence.

As annoying as these calls are, it’s fun to try to trick the chip inside Matt’s fake brain by responding with unintelligible gibberish: “Hey Matt, start the hovercraft we are going to Tijuana”, to which Matt will say: “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that”.

Perhaps this is what Matt from the Wine Concierge looks like?

Or to get his hopes up by saying: “Sure Matt, I’d like one million bottles of riesling”.

Most commonly you just resort to full-throttled abuse along the lines of “Hey Matt why don’t you p--- off you massive pain in the a---, I’m making chili con carne for my kids.”

“That’s great,” Matt will reply in his chummy way. “From memory, you like McLaren Vale grenache.”

I really do Matt, but I’m not buying it from you. It takes a special kind of genius not to sell me wine.

If any of you obtained my number and rang saying you had found an old flagon of D’Arenberg red in the back shed I’d drive over now and give you five bucks for it.

But if Matt rang saying the Wine Concierge had magnums of 2004 Penfolds 389 for $10 a pop, I’d still tell him to get stuffed as a matter of general principle, as this company is a stain on our great wine industry which, by bombarding us with impertinent spam calls, makes it harder for good wineries to sell wine.

Penbo doesn’t care what wine Matt is offering him, he’d just rather speak to a real person.

The case of the Wine Concierge contains a valuable lesson for business more broadly.

This company has the lowest possible rating, one star, on Google and on other review sites, and has also been forced to pay tens of thousands in fines for breaches of telecommunication laws.

The company is despised because it is a fully automated and inhuman impertinence aimed at making as much money as possible.

We learn this week that our national telco Telstra will soon be more automated and less human with the removal of some 2800 living breathing human beings from its workforce. That’s 10 per cent of Telstra’s staff, a huge number of people consigned to the scrap heap. Telstra’s bosses have explained that it’s all being done with a heavy heart, that these people will get support, but that amid times of continuing technological change such displacements are inevitable, blah di blah di blah.

Telstra will axe 2800 jobs in the direct workforce in a move that will save the telco $350 million by the end of the 2025 financial year. Picture: NewsWire/Gaye Gerard

An important point for Telstra to remember here: people are happier with businesses when they have the human touch.

One of the reasons Qantas copped so much opprobrium at the shabby tail end of the Alan Joyce era is that, as a company, it has become so much harder to communicate with.

In any negative engagement with Qantas – where’s my bag, do you know when my cancelled flight might be leaving – it felt customers weren’t so much there to be served as endured.

Much of that comes down to the near-complete phasing out of face-to-face service and the downgrading of proper phone service, meaning you feel like you’ve won the lottery if you actually get a living person to help you solve either of the aforementioned problems.

The major supermarkets have faced widespread criticism for using self-scan technology to get rid of checkout assistants and then compounding the insult by bringing in new technology to treat their supposedly valued customers as potential thieves.

Like many people, there is no way I would go through the malarkey of self-scanning anything, let alone in a supermarket where I might be filmed and then set off a buzzer while they run the tape upstairs VAR-style to see if I scanned my watermelon.

And don’t get me started – again – on the new catchphrase at the Maccas drive-through: “Are you using the app today?”

This daft sentence could be accurately replaced with “are you breaking the law today?” as it suggests motorists should be driving through a crowded carpark while hitting a series of online selection boxes saying they want extra pickle and bacon added to the burger in their Quarter Pounder meal, which you should always do.

Macca’s is removing the need for human interaction via its app.

There is something nice about talking to actual people. It’s reassuring. It’s fun. It enables those little moments that make life memorable.

Earlier this year, one of the women at my supermarket casually told me it was her last week at work because her Only Fans website was going gangbusters.

For the first time in my life I thought maybe it was time to embrace technology after all.

You don’t get wild random conversations with a computer, unless you’re romantically attracted to Dexter from Perfect Match.

To move from big business to the very small. One of my favourite small businesses ever closed its door this month.

Dining stalwarts Teresa and Enzo Fazzari are set to close their restaurant Enzo's on Port Road after 25 years. They know a thing or two about proper customer service Picture: Tom Huntley

It’s a family-run Italian restaurant called Enzos and it is, or was, everything an Italian restaurant should be – superb food, owners who knew your name, waiters in black and white suits who always remembered your favourite dishes and recited the specials from memory without missing a beat.

Compare that to the irritating and growing fad of QR codes on restaurant tables so you can order online, giving in-house dining all the warmth and charm of using Uber Eats.

Now that their restaurant is closed, perhaps Telstra and every other major tech-obsessed company could have a word with the wonderful Enzo himself and his lovely wife Teresa and ask them what real service looks like.

Conversely, they could get a phone call from Matt from the Wine Concierge, to see what it doesn’t look like.

Originally published as Companies bringing in AI and automated customer service are taking us for a ride | David Penberthy