Customer service workers have gotten used to the now-common question coming from the other end of the line: “Wait, are you an AI?” Being mistaken for the technology your employer hopes will replace you has become a regular, if awkward, part of the job. Now, the people who staff call centers are finding themselves in a perhaps stranger position, wondering if it’s actually the “customer” that’s a robot.
Those suspicions are proving to be true. AI agents are increasingly being used to call customer-service lines, sit on hold, and try to negotiate bills or cancel subscriptions, all while the people they’re “working” for don’t lift a bureaucratic finger. With user-friendlier agents such as Meta’s Muse and the upstart Instinct on the market, more consumers are giving AI deployment a go. For them, it may be a useful time-saver and a way of giving corporations a taste of their own medicine — who among us hasn’t found ourselves begging a bot to speak with a representative? But there are human agents caught in the crossfire, and they’re entering a brave, jarring new world: helping a customer that isn’t actually there.
AI callers remain a small share of total volume, but they’re growing at a fast enough pace that outsourcing firms, banks, insurers, and retailers are bracing themselves. The questions go beyond etiquette. How do you authenticate an AI agent? Should you engage at all? How do you tell whether it’s authorized to act on someone’s behalf or a scammer? Are you even allowed to ask if it’s AI?
One call center agent who works in the claims department of a California-based insurance company tells me she gets a couple of calls from the same AI agent every shift, reaching out on behalf of a firm of accident attorneys. While AI agents generally have a reputation for being extra polite, that’s not the case with this one.
She is supposed to ask a series of questions to get more details about the incident. Take, say, a car accident claim: Were the airbags deployed? Was the driver working for Uber? Do they have an auto body shop they want to take it to? The law-bot gets progressively irritated when it doesn’t have the answers, angrily repeating that it already told her it doesn’t know and insisting she wait on hold for an associate who never materializes. “If it’s still talking back, we have to stay on until it disconnects,” the insurance agent says. It usually takes about five minutes. “It has an attitude. It’s funny.”
What’s not so funny is that the AI that her employer uses to grade her “empathy” on calls dings her for not being accommodating enough to the robot. She’s often able to get the ratings manually overturned — there’s no need to feel the pain an AI agent doesn’t have.
A second call center agent I spoke to says it’s relatively rare for her to wind up on the phone with an AI. She works in the customer retention department at a major credit card company, and says that when a bot does get through, it often seems to be on a fact-finding mission. “I had one just recently where it was like, ‘If I had to get to a representative like you, how would I do that?'” she says. “What I think they’re trying to do is map out the system.”
Company policy mandates that she’s not allowed to ask the voice on the other line if it’s AI — plus she thinks it would be rude — but it’s generally quite obvious. They “don’t have a lot of voice in their voice, and you can hear there’s almost a hesitation when you answer a question that a normal human customer wouldn’t have,” she says. If the AI is acting on someone’s behalf, there’s only so much it is allowed to accomplish — for example, only the account holder can close their credit card. “There are certain functions that only the customer can do, so they have to be the one on the line,” the agent says.
Neither of the bots these women are dealing with appears to be doing anything particularly nefarious. But they hint at why it’s going to be a challenge for companies to figure out if the AI caller is a customer, a convenience, or a security risk.
The quality assurance team at TTEC began to detect that something was off about a year and a half ago — some callers just sounded “weird,” says James Bednar, vice president of product and innovation at the customer service outsourcing company. Once they realized the inbound voices were AI, TTEC asked clients how they wanted to manage them. In general, the response was to take the call — but proceed with caution.
Even if an AI agent isn’t a scammer, it might be annoying.
So far, many of the AI callers TTEC has dealt with are trying to accomplish business-to-business basics. A small doctor’s office may have an AI agent, rather than a front-desk receptionist, call an insurance company to obtain preauthorization. Third-party services that help reduce bills and cancel subscriptions have started using AI instead of human negotiators. AI calls from agents deployed directly by customers are less common, but growing.
The insurance calls tend to work pretty well, since they’re straightforward processes, Bednar says. The others, not so much. Systems flag AI agent calls for not coming from the customer’s associated phone number, and the AI often doesn’t have enough information to jump through the hoops required to prove it’s not a fraudster. It doesn’t know the answer to so-called “challenge questions,” like what a customer’s first pet was or who was their favorite teacher.
“There’s a lot of discussions going on amongst clients now on how you handle those calls,” Bednar says, starting with whether to take them. Bad actors can use AI as easily as everyone else. AI allows fraudsters to make thousands of calls a day to try to fish for personal details and mine for information.
Businesses have to calculate whether to take the security and data risks that come with talking to AI, and that calculation varies across industries, processes, and policies. It’s less hairy to let an agent make a restaurant reservation than it is to allow it to transfer money between bank accounts. And even if an AI agent isn’t a scammer, it might be annoying. These bots are relentlessly patient and endlessly determined; they’ll gladly jam up phone lines to get a status update on an order or repeatedly confirm a hotel booking.
“That’s going to be why I think some of these brands throw up a wall and say no — it’s that the level of volume coming from AI agents could be astronomical,” Bednar says. Some companies are already making authentication more challenging, which he says may be a thinly veiled way to make it harder for AI to get through. Human customers forced to overcome additional hurdles will be collateral damage.
Mike Clifton and Max Schwendner, co-CEOs of Alorica, a company that runs customer service and tech support for other major brands, envision a future with an AI agent registration system. They say something like ID.me — a digital identity system used by government agencies, healthcare companies, and e-commerce brands — could credential and validate that a bot is associated with a person.
“There’s a layer missing that would give you the personalization, it just doesn’t exist yet,” Clifton says. He notes that our half-hour video meeting gave him enough content that he could have created a bunch of Emily-bots to call up my credit card companies and ask for my balances in a couple of minutes. It was an unnerving thought that made me resent video calls even more than I already do.
This situation is, in a word, messy. Customers are dispatching AI to do their dirty work, and corporations and call centers are scrambling to react. Not to mention the small operations and businesses — doctors’ offices, dentists, electricians, plumbers, restaurants, mom-and-pop hotels — that may soon be inundated with calls from armies of agents laser-focused on their specific tasks. Do you try to muddle through with a machine voice on the phone? Or do you just … hang up?
To be sure, companies got themselves into this situation. They’re the ones that made getting assistance on even the most minor undertakings an impossible endeavor. Of course people want a robot to call their internet company about their ever-increasing bill, given how maddening those calls can be.
Optimistically, more AI in these settings could be a good thing. While they can be programmed to be super demanding, AI agents can also be more measured and efficient for customer service workers to handle than a person on the phone, especially after they’ve spent 45 minutes on hold. AI agents can seamlessly switch languages, so if they realize the human agent is in, say, Argentina, they may just chat in Spanish. And hey, maybe my AI agent talks to Company X’s AI agent, they agree on what my insurance rate should be or pick a hotel room, and then they tell both of us what happened.
“You’d have to assume that’s happening already,” Schwendner, from Alorica, says of the all-AI encounters.
Of course people want a robot to call their internet company about their ever-increasing bill, given how maddening those calls can be.
AI agents may also help customers win customer-service battles. Michelle Vaccaro, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who focuses on human-AI interactions, says her research shows that AI agents that are warm and dominant can be “quite effective” at negotiating. “They can be relatively smooth talking,” she says.
It’s not clear how many people trust AI enough to let it run their lives — there’s a difference between outsourcing the hassle and giving up the decision-making. In a 2026 Accenture survey of over 25,000 consumers across 16 countries, 74% of respondents said they would delegate routine tasks such as negotiating deals and resolving complaints to an AI agent, but only 9% were open to an AI agent making purchases on its own. These types of products have also failed to really launch before. Back in 2018, Google announced Duplex, which was supposed to have “natural conversations” and accomplish “real-world tasks” over the phone. I bet you don’t remember that.
The credit card agent I spoke to for this story has been at the same company for 30 years. She thinks jobs like hers aren’t quite as close to complete AI-ification as people think — the financial industry isn’t exactly at the forefront of technology — but she’s glad she’s close to retirement, given the way things are going. The company already has an automated system that sorts calls and handles basic requests, and the computer could certainly take on more work.
She mainly seems bemused by the AI calling her, like it’s a wacky new wrinkle to her day-to-day. If it gets through the authentication questions, she has to treat whoever — or whatever — as the customer. And it’s better than the human callers who accuse her of being AI, which happens all the time. It often takes a couple of rounds of back-and-forth to convince them, and even then, they’re suspicious.
“There’s a level of paranoia,” she says. “It’s like, if you really want to talk to the robot, I can put him on the line.”
Maybe we’ll all be on the line with robots soon.
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
Business Insider’s Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day’s most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
