Will Personal AI Agents Flood Customer Service?

Ethan Mollick says a perfectly legal distributed denial of service on customer service departments is coming, authorized by millions of consumers, once it is widely known that Muse, Dot, and similar agents can make unlimited requests for old refunds and negotiate deals. Banking and customer service depend on friction: it is hard to make a phone call, annoying to file something, and it takes effort to gather paperwork.

Proactive agents already do the work at scale. His Dot cancelled several long-term subscriptions he could not get out of, and he does not know how many systems it spun up. As the tools become widely available, companies are not ready. Apollo Research pointed out a related threat to the banking system: the economy depends on people leaving small amounts of money in low-interest accounts because moving it is too hard.