Can self-service soon be thrown in the trash? And the IVR? And the 'my page'? And the FAQs? Where does it end when agentic AI is given room? Or should we say: jumps over the fence? 

Self-service? Duh, soon I’ll have an AI agent for that as a consumer. As consumers, we cobble together our own AI agents using vibe coding, and off we go. Or ze, because we sit still, while the AI ​​agents carve their way through our digital lives unseen. We provide them with some guardrails, hoping for the best.

The promise of vibe coding is enormous. Investment companies Nowadays, they use vibe coding to quickly check how special (or not) certain applications are, so that they can potentially adjust their investment strategy. Of course, you don't replace your ERP or CRM system with a weekend of tinkering with Claude. That is not what this column is about, after all. But for those who do not believe in the potential of vibe coding: Zip was also brought into the world with it (in the span of two weekends).

Vibe coding also offers the consumer new possibilities. For example, creating a working app in just a few minutes that helps remind you of something exactly on time, guides you step-by-step in making choices, or simply makes the choices for you. And immediately organizes, arranges, or orders it as well. From installment payments to hotel reservations.

As customer contact professionals, we must prepare ourselves for a boom of bizarre and poorly designed home-made AI agents bombarding our back or front offices with messy requests. After all, no company has yet planted a convincing flag in that digital no-man's-land.

The annoying thing about machine customers is that they act on behalf of your client. Because they are just as rational and efficient as a 12-year-old, as a company you will likely have to disappoint your clients' AI agents often. On the other hand, showing empathy is not necessary in these conversations.

If those consumer agents lead to problems and chaos, the owners of these hobby products must take action. However, I have yet to meet the first customer who admits their mistake to customer service for irresponsible digital behavior.

Vibe coding for consumers—that’s not the black run, but off-piste skiing. By the way, deploying such a rescue helicopter costs a few thousand euros per hour. Are homemade AI agents already included in private liability insurance?

Jurassic Park is, of course, a very bad example in this context. After all, you can shoot all the cloned and thawed dinosaurs, and there is surely a way to destroy all the dinosaur DNA afterward. All's well that ends well, and it was just an island in the sea.

AI agents belong to a different category – think of the 'genie in a bottle' category. Moreover, for customer service, that synthetic 'customer' adds to all the other existing digital challenges, such as decent accessibility, data breaches, turnover, absenteeism, and fraud.

That Vattenfall indicated in all openness that it was taking into account the arrival of machine customers, is good news in itself. But at the same time also worrying: why is it so quiet at other companies?

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

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