“AI will end dark patterns” tweeted Joshua Browder earlier this year. Joshua is an entrepreneur behind a fascinating site called ‘DO NOT PAY’ that makes its money helping consumers win everyday battles with large companies and government agencies. Wikipedia explains that a dark pattern is “a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills”. The difficulty and unfairness of trying to find the way to cancel subscriptions is something the US Federal Trade Commission has been looking into recently
Browder’s tweet includes a video of their GPT-4 bot negotiating with the New York Times to cancel his subscription. He points out that unlike a human, a bot has endless patience. So the deliberate inertia built into the cancellation process can easily be overcome. Many companies require a human customer to make a phone call or go into live chat with a customer service agent in order to cancel a service. That barrier is there because companies know we are often too busy to bother. Operating those contact center service lines may be lucrative, if the friction they generate ensures continuity of subscription revenues streams. But if AI enabled customer software can call up instead of the human – then that business trade-off equation changes.
The rise of the custobot could undermine business models that have become dependent on this kind of friction to maintain high margins and forward revenue visibility. Stock markets often reward such models with higher PE ratios. So any systemic threat to such a model could be quite risky to the future stock price. Executive teams whose remuneration packages depend on stock price improvements should pay particular attention.
However, the rise of machine customers is not all disruption and downside. The insertion of machine customers into an industry could help increase the total addressable market substantially. How you can win in a machine customer world is focus of our new book about this important emerging megatrend. We hope you will take moment to browse it.
