Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- This doesn’t surprise me.
Set up whatever online portal or app you want. I’d prefer to just sign in and click a button.
If I’m picking up the phone or sending an email it’s because I have a weird problem and I need to talk to a person.
by coffeefirst - I guess everything is ok these days as long as the President says "We screwed up [our most basic responsibility to customers], and we own that."by crystaln
- my experience with AI assistants has not been that great so far, they ask for customer id numbers which are long as ... with several digits and if you group them they don't understand, for example if the number begins with two 1s and you say eleven instead of one one they don't understand you, then they are usually not trained for the local pronunciation or dialect which makes it very hard communicating, my blood pressure rises into unhealthy ranges, but if I use expletives enough I get a human on the lineby wolfi1
- Related: A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency (11 days ago, 40 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49105190by kotaKat
- Wow, it lasted over a week.by recursive
- Not Pharmacy, but I literally had Shopify checkout button clickjack me and then AI agent and human agents (chat, email, and phone) refuse to cancel the resulting order today. Despite contacting within 5 minutes. Given how hostile so many companies are, I question why they even bother appearing to have support.
But this doesn't seem likely to translate well to pharmacy, where there will be consequences for treating customers like vermin, as opposed to actual incentives to do it.
I wouldn't be shocked if the tech needed in places like pharmacy or other sectors where there's some level forced responsibility leads to the version that's actually palatable elsewhere.
by Glyptodon - Actual personal service from a human being is the main reason that I'd choose a small regional pharmacy over a local CVS or mail-order. It seems to me like personal service is the ONLY advantage a regional chain like this has. If I were them, I'd lean into it rather than burning customer's goodwill with AI.by drewg123
- This is my favorite AI customer service story:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
> Air Canada essentially argued that “the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions”
by criddell - That event happened in 2022. It keeps being tagged as "AI" when it was nothing more than a dumb front end for a document search.
Yes, it still screwed up. And yes, Air Canada tried to weasel out of it, but even though it was a chatbot it had no LLM behind it.
- LOL, pleased to read that Air Canada got smacked down.
Yeah, if I'm calling or chatting with a company, I expect them to stand by whatever commitments they make, and I will judge them harshly if they don't. This is true whether an AI or a human is speaking on the company's behalf.
by impendia - Pharmacy phone lines are a terrible first use case for voice AI. Older callers, drug names, insurance mess, zero patience. Automating "store hours" is fine. Automating refill exceptions is how you get this outcome.by SalaevAl
- I just don't get why we're not doing it vertically like you said here. Implement a part of the cognitive work using AI but let the hard parts be done by a person. They're still gonna be more rich, just less so.by barbazoo
- Explain to me then why pharmacies have almost exclusively used IVR based phone systems for pharmacy refills and prescription management for the last decade?
Like they don’t even say the full name of the prescription they just tell you the first three letters and they’ll say “for the patient born on…”
Current pharmacy IT systems are currently almost 100% automated so how are you claiming it’s the first use?
- We build text-based (e.g. SMS rather than voice) agents for various medical conversations (e.g. preparing people for complex appointments).
Our user base skews elderly. Going in, I was really skeptical about how much engagement and value we could provide to these older patients. I'm blown away how well it all turned out and how valuable it's been for our patients and client clinics.
For example, we were able to reduce no-shows for some high-cost appointments by 80%. Turns out that the reasons why people don't show up are a complicated and diffuse — everything form anxiety, to not speaking english, to being confused about how to get into the building — and properly configured LLM-based systems are really, really good at dealing with exactly this sort of problem.
by zukzuk - Companies will pawn off thier customers to AI at their peril.
In many ways this is a repeat of the India call center train wrecks of the 00s. On paper, letting someone in Bangalore vs onshore handle incoming customer service calls looked like a path to amazing savings. In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. AI is just that story of shortsighted decisions by weak leadership playing out all over again.
by cmiles8 - > In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again.
No they didn’t, I can’t remember the last time I talked to an on shore rep.
by le-mark - > companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again.
Not here in UK. They rerouted to the Phillipines, Egypt etc.
by chrisjj - This, I suspect, is exactly like offshoring - and a lot of companies died during the offshoring fad because their software products become full of low quality merges and feature improvements that the company couldn't afford to fix or remove by the time they realized there was a problem. That remains my primary concern with AI code generation - well established codebases might become full of slop to the point of being unusable without a clear path back to maintainability leading to company death.by munk-a
- The bigger question is that given all the consolidation and monopolies, if the top 2/3 companies do this, what is the alternative? Even for something like car insurance in the US, all the ELT at those want EBITDA at all costs. I'm not sure what fall out will be.by snarf21
- Its still a huge and growing business and one that AI helps https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/call-centres-using-ai-whi...by graemep
- So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider.
First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important domain expertise and implementations are.
Second, the amount of noise of "Voice AI for <industry>" is incredible. Most of them are completely clueless about the industry & basically "YC-striver" type who can only sell to other yc companies. They fail hard the moment they touch critical functions of the real world.
We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready".
- As someone who has worked with companies in the space more than a decade ago, I'm glad that you're doing this! Genuinely love the "embedded not installed" approach.
I suspect that applying an aerospace approach of dissimilar redundancy and root cause analysis to this will yield a much better experience for everyone (i.e. you, the pharmacies and the patients) than what would have been possible with humans alone.
I've ranted about this before, but medicine as it stands isn't a serious field. And I can say that with a straight face, because medicine has until now, been the only field of modern scientific endeavor (or rather cloaked under modern scientific endeavor) that has fought tooth and nail against gathering more data points for improving understanding.
More detail here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762650
I'm glad that you're doing this!
by areoform - Good to see info on how critical domain expertise is for success.
I've seen AI used well in a few support situations, and it is great - faster to get to the answer vs a human (usually faster than even getting to a human, which is another issue)
When my case can be handled by the automated system, it is great, when it is not, it is usually misery, leading to anger at the customer and whatever company sold them that automated isht.
Especially for intelligent knowledgeable users of anything, by the time we call, it is an issue likely to need escalation.
So, the one absolutely critical factor for me and everyone I know is: how fast and easy is it to get to a human when we find the automated assistance does not work for our particular issue? It should be "I need to speak to a human now", and the immediate response should be "OK, let me get you one... Hello, this is [person], how can I help?" with the prior transcript already on the human's screen.
If this works, it is good because the humans are operating a level up, not having to deal with endless monotonous minutiae, and dealing with interesting issues all day, which means they get good at it and have a better attitude — a win for all.
How, and how well do you handle that situation — how close are you to the proper response I described?
by toss1 - Make it so the parts that are done by AI are rock solid, until then, they shouldn't be near a customer and be done by humans. Resist the greed!by barbazoo
- We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy.
Is your pharmacy one of your customers? Do you use your own product regularly?
by reaperducer - > First, The technology works
God I would love it if this comment is read out at a hearing about defrauding investors or massively leaking PII
by MSFT_Edging - Starting with your funding and who you've acquired tells me whatever follows is not really worth reading.by GreenVulpine
- > We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy
How happy are their patients?
by anon7725 - > We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready".
This is such a great graph. Your company feels successful because your customer is happy yet the rest of the world would be just happy if your company died in a fire. This seems to also be just fine for companies like yours.
by dylan604 - FWIW I know of a pharmacy network that's implementing AI. Not only does the AI make egregious errors like speaking in Spanish when the conversation is in English. It also has a limited context window for ground rules of 5000 tokens or less. So correcting all the various errors goes over the instructions limit. As a result if the implementation goes through it will be of poor quality. All I can think is that people with no technical expertise are making these decisions, it is easy for any techie to predict that AI of this level won't be capable.by dj_axl