YC founders, would you trust AI to handle 90% of your support chats?
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me and my co-founder are building an AI agent because at our last startup we just couldn’t keep up with support.
we tried every chatbot out there. they all felt… robotic. customers hated it.
hiring more people was too slow + too $$$
so we put together this ai chatbot (think intercom fin but deeper) that trains on your old tickets, learns your tone, doesn’t hallucinate, and can actually answer stuff like a real support rep.
here’s the thing though… even when it works, founders get nervous about letting AI talk to their users. like, what if it says something stupid? what if it sounds off-brand?
curious if anyone here has tried automating support.
did it work for you?
where did it break?
would you let AI take over 90% of your chats or nah?
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Replies
Have you tried testing your AI to see how it functions?
I've seen couple of AI agents assisting customers and personally, I've been helped by some. So it just depends on who you introduce your product to.
Also if you'd like something like a provenance layer that verifies output and provide receipts of it's information for your AI, you can let me know to introduce you to a product like that and they'll like a partnership.
Softorino 💻📲
@kehindeadeoye Good questions. We’ve been running tests on live ticket history and comparing AI replies to human responses. So far, it’s holding up well, but I agree it depends a lot on who you roll it out to first. The provenance layer sounds interesting — would be great if you could intro us to that product.
As of now, I haven't used any platforms that are this capable. But in the future, if I find the perfect tool to do so, I will definitely use it—after testing it thoroughly.
Softorino 💻📲
@sunny_k_s exactly... and during the sales pitch or website demo, it looks perfect. But once you start setting it up yourself, that's when it goes south.
we’re building something that’s easy to test safely (before going live).
@bdzhel great!
If a chatbot solves my problem, I don't care whether it's a machine or a person, as long as it's in written form. I hate voice assistants in customer service, especially when I have an urgent question and the robot doesn't understand what I want — it's infuriating. But in any case, there should be an option to talk to a real person. Not all questions can be solved by an AI bot.
Softorino 💻📲
@ideaxton same. i just want it to work — don’t care if it’s a robot as long as i get help.
we’ve built in human fallback for that reason too.
and yeah… voice bots are still "not real" enough. THough elevenlabs is moving pretty fast to help you get it right.
Ara
I would! As long as i built the ai to my customs!
Softorino 💻📲
@adi_singh5 nice! what would your dream ai agent actually do?
I would AB test: CS agent and AI. Based on results decide if rolling it out to all audience
Softorino 💻📲
@adriana97 smart!! what kind of result would convince you to roll it out fully?
It depends on the complexity of the software. I helped one of my clients implement an AI Chatbot; it's well trained, and we keep training it on a regular basis as new knowledge becomes available. However, in their case, they've been around for 35 years, and their software is niche and complicated; a chatbot can only help with basic questions/answers. This said, in many cases, this is enough. In other cases, support is almost at a service level and needs to be handled by an expert who also understands a customer's hardware environment. IMHO: You'll never know until you try, and don't underestimate the power of human interaction when it comes to solving business-critical support issues
Softorino 💻📲
@petradiener 100%. some stuff still needs real humans — especially when it’s hardware or super niche.
we’ve focused on ai that knows when not to guess, and defers when needed.
Softorino 💻📲
@petradiener just looping back — we went live with @CoSupport AI today
built it based on convos like this one 🙌"
link here if you wanna check it out: https://www.producthunt.com/products/cosupport-ai
Intercom Fin is in fact what we use, trained on years and years of our blog posts and weekly newsletters. It is primary responder on over 80% (and rising each week) of issues and is the only respondent on over 80% and rising of those, so overall it is handling about 65% and rising of all issues without intervention. Obviously, I don't know where the ceiling for its unassisted operation is, but I guess to the original question, I think it is "taking over" more than 80% of our support chats already. I don't know if we're configured to have the human responders be on the front line at all, so I can't quite answer the question asked.
Softorino 💻📲
@albert_chou thanks for sharing that — super insightful. over 80% is impressive. curious how much of that is repetitive stuff vs more edge cases? we’re working on something similar, just with more control over the content source.
we've been using hiver for our support team and honestly, the hybrid approach works best. AI handles repetitive stuff (password resets, basic FAQs) but humans jump in for complex/emotional convos.
the "AI takeover" fear is real. customers can tell when something's off, even if the answer's technically correct.
90% automation sounds risky unless you have killer oversight. maybe start at 40-50% and gradually scale based on CSAT scores?
btw hiver's shared inbox makes the AI→human handoff pretty smooth.