A client asked for an AI chatbot because a competitor had one. We asked what the chatbot would be for. There was a pause, and then an answer about “being more modern.”
The tell
The tell is always the same: the bot gets built before anyone reads the support inbox. Nobody has yet asked what people actually write in, how often the same three questions come up, or whether the current form fails silently on mobile. The bot is a solution being carried around, looking for a problem to attach itself to.
What the inbox usually says
When we do read it first, the same shape appears almost every time: a shipping question that a clearer line on the product page would have answered, a returns policy nobody can find, and a handful of genuinely hard cases that need a person, not a script.
Automating the easy two thirds is a good use of AI. It also means fixing the page first, which is less interesting to demo and considerably more useful.
Ship the boring fix first
If the chatbot survives contact with an actually-fixed page — if there is still real volume it would meaningfully reduce — build it. Most of the time the page fix alone drops the volume enough that the bot stops being worth the maintenance.
The tell is always the same: the bot gets built before anyone reads the support inbox.