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Josh

YC founders, would you trust AI to handle 90% of your support chats?

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Softorino 💻📲
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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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Kehinde Adeoye

  1. Have you tried testing your AI to see how it functions?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Josh

@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.

Sunny_K_S

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.

Josh

@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).

Sunny_K_S

@bdzhel great!

Tom Ideaxton

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.

Josh

@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.

Marcus Freeland
As a founder of a customer support platform, I’ll say that I can see how everyone has a bad taste in their mouth from other chatbots. They are robotic and act like they don’t have the information accessible to them to respond accurately. I spent months researching and tweaking before making the AI Assistant module live for users. The assistant really knows your content and refers to it when answering. I think that has been a huge differentiator when comparing. Users are starting to warm up to it (just released the AI features in June), but I can say that I would not have trusted any other chatbot out there. Most of the chatbots feel kind of lazy once you’ve used one that responds well and doesn’t hallucinate. It actually feels like it’s helping you and not just “answering” because it has to.
Josh

@marcusfreeland this hits home. we built our whole stack around that same idea — make ai actually help, not just respond. feels like most bots are just bluffing their way through. yours sounds like it actually does the work.

Marcus Freeland

@bdzhel “Bluffing through” is the perfect expression! Having AI be helpful is a solid way to build, it’s nice to hear about your journey in building this.

Josh

@marcusfreeland yeah we just launched it today actually — so feel free to try it and give your thoughts https://www.producthunt.com/products/cosupport-ai

Adi Singh

I would! As long as i built the ai to my customs!

Josh

@adi_singh5 nice! what would your dream ai agent actually do?

Adriana

I would AB test: CS agent and AI. Based on results decide if rolling it out to all audience

Josh

@adriana97 smart!! what kind of result would convince you to roll it out fully?

Albert Chou

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.

Josh

@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.

UD Stark

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.

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