Against your view
A stress test for “agents close routine requests; people see only exceptions”: Taobao randomized 647 support workers. Only 5.8% of chats were AI-eligible; these were 16.8% shorter, but customer ratings fell 0.412/5, while seven-day same-issue recontacts did not significantly change. In a matched subset of agent-handled chats, 65% escalated; emotional escalations had six percentage points more recontacts than comparable human-only chats. The exception boundary—and how soon it fires—is part of the product, not a footnote. This is 2024 customer support, not a test of software-team requests.
Human intervention preserves service quality in algorithm-triggered technical escalations ... but is less effective in algorithm-triggered emotional escalations