The Great AI Agent Letdown—and the Rise of the AI Customer Advocate

The promise was bold: faster service, lower costs, and happier customers, all powered by AI agents. But for too many organizations, the reality has been a letdown. Instead of improving service, AI agents have created new barriers: they stall on complex cases, frustrate users with canned responses, and operate in silos that mirror—and amplify—organizational inefficiencies.

AI brings incredible transformation potential. So, what went wrong?

We didn’t dream big enough...

AI Agents Promised Service Revolution. They Delivered Frustration.

The early vision of AI in customer service centered around automation. Agents would handle requests like humans, but faster and cheaper. But while we succeeded in scaling response volume, we failed at delivering real outcomes. Just ask fintech giant Klarna, who slashed headcount by 24% claiming its agent could manage 2.3 million chats a month, only to reverse course a year later after customers complained of “robotic responses, inflexible scripts and the Kafkaesque loop of repeating their issue to a human after the bot failed.”  

This story is now all too familiar and very frustrating. In trying to eliminate human involvement, we removed the most critical ingredients in great service: judgment, empathy, and coordination.

Customers want results. Not automated, robotic responses that only lead to dead ends.

AI Gone Wrong: The Headlines Tell the Story

The cracks are showing:

• Duolingo’s CEO unveiled its “AI-first” strategy with plans to eliminate contractors if AI could do the job and faced significant backlash from customers and employees alike.
  
  
• Cursor, a company providing AI-powered coding tools, faced a user revolt after its AI support bot invented a new business policy that led to mass confusion and customer cancellations.
  
  
• Air Canada’s chatbot misled a grieving customer, resulting in a legal loss and PR disaster.
  
  
• Gartner’s latest survey reports that “agentless contact centers” are “not yet technically feasible, nor operationally desirable,” after half of businesses responded that they are rethinking plans to replace humans with customer service bots.

The message is clear: service automation that ignores human complexity will always fail at human connection. And let’s face it…humans are complex, almost every customer situation is unique, and organizational operations are siloed. It’s not that much of a mystery why there is so much dissatisfaction with self-service AI automation. AI agents just can’t go far enough. They hit the ceiling. 

The Wake-Up Call: AI Advocacy, Not Just Automation

AI customer advocacy isn’t just a trend, it’s a turning point. At this year's HumanX conference, I joined a senior executive from AAA to share how they escaped the AI agent trap with Ripley, the industry’s first AI customer advocate, created by Riptide. Ripley is in production transforming AAA’s roadside service for 13 million AAA members every day. 

Unlike AI agents given tasks to execute, AI advocates are given a purpose to deliver outcomes. It doesn’t just respond to customers—it represents them. It navigates your systems, communicates with your people, coordinates with your partners, and ensures the customer’s objective is achieved, up to 10 times faster and at 50% lower cost.

AAA adopted Ripley to transform their service model in just 90 days. The results?

• Wait times slashed 10x
• Dispatch coordination dramatically improved
• A 50% reduction in handle time
• A 4% jump (and climbing) in customer satisfaction

AAA is proving that AI advocates deliver on the promise AI agents failed to keep.

From Containment to Coordination

Modern customer service isn’t a solo act. It’s a complex dance involving people, processes, and systems. Several moving parts that all need to be in sync. Traditional AI agents operate like isolated performers. Ripley acts as a conductor, orchestrating actions across dispatchers, service technicians, and contact center agents in real time.

For example: if a stranded motorist with a dead battery changes their address, Ripley automatically updates the system, sending the roadside service technician to the new location and updating the motorist on the revised ETA. If the motorist texts, “I’m waiting inside the Starbucks,” Ripley ensures the service technician is updated instantly without burdening the other parties. If the motorist instead said, “I just noticed my car is also leaking oil,” Ripley might open a case with a contact center agent to schedule a tow instead of a jump start, while updating the motorist and canceling the original battery service with the dispatcher and technician. Focused on meeting the customer’s needs, Ripley automatically and efficiently works toward resolution.

No delays, no miscommunication, no missed connections.

Ripley is AI that listens deeply, acts intelligently, and knows exactly when to leverage the right human expertise. Not as an escalation or handoff, but as part of a collaborative human + AI Advocate team.

What Makes an AI Customer Advocate?

Ripley defines a new category of enterprise AI—AI Advocacy—built on four pillars:

• Customer Advocacy: Every interaction starts with the customer’s goal and a deep understanding of how your business operates, not a script.
  
  
• Team Orchestration: Ripley understands roles, systems, responsibilities, and the specific resources assigned—so it can coordinate like a pro.
  
  
• Trusted Engagement: Ripley acts as the sole representative for your company to the customer, speaking on behalf of all parties in a way that is consistent with your brand’s voice, policies and values, with the customer’s objective as its sole purpose.
  
  
• Operational Harmony: Ripley communicates across operational silos, facilitating multiple simultaneous communications, to resolve issues and deliver frictionless experiences on behalf of the customer, saving time and money.

A Blueprint for the Post-Agent Era

This shift isn’t theoretical. It’s happening now. Companies like AAA are breaking free from traditional AI models and embracing customer advocacy as their service superpower.

If your AI investments are falling short—if your agents are automating frustration instead of resolution—Ripley is your blueprint forward. Because the future isn’t about replacing humans. It’s about designing AI that helps your organization think and act together for the customer, with the customer, and always in the customer’s best interest.

Ripley doesn’t just answer questions. It champions outcomes.

It’s AI the way your customers would have built it: a champion for their needs, a skilled navigator of your operations, and always ready to leverage human expertise when it counts.

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