As it is, bots make most of the decisions on Amazon, and when they make a decision it’s extremely hard to overturn it. So, with the exception of highly paid programs like SAS Core, I think Amazon is working to make the marketplace completely AI controlled. At some point, if you request a “call me now,” you’ll be speaking to ChatGPT, not a person.
My prediction is this will occur in 2.5 years. That would be May 2026.
I don’t think this would actually be a negative thing though. As it is, anytime a seller submits an appeal/case, it’s likely that their bots scan it and make some kind of decision, then the human merely confirms/overturns the bot decision, or the human is strictly making a decision based on a very rigid checklist (something an AI can be programmed to do). If it becomes fully AI controlled, instead of waiting days for a response, ChatGPT will get back to you within a few seconds/minutes.
I have assumed for a while that Bots/AI do ALL the back end legwork and present it to an outsourced human in a condensed half page summary. They are then presented two buttons. A big pulsing red one for SUSPEND, and a small green one for “Bot is Mistaken”
Pretty much this, and the people they hire don’t actually have the brain cells to figure out if the bot’s really wrong or not.
So at that point they might as well cut all those people and just have the AI be fully in charge.
Step 1 : Replace the forum, drive out experienced forum users
Step 2 : Support starts SENDING people to the forum for answers
Step 3 : One Year after forum take-over Chat Bots begin appearing on the forum…
I have often said that support is either handled by bot or by human prototype for a bot.
I interacted with an Xfintity employee in the Philippines who could no longer follow the prepared script. Xfinitity had previously failed to make a service appointment that they claimed to have made. The script denied they had made the appointment.
The employee started to follow the script and then told me this is all bull. The system is not booking appointments when the CSR tries. After 40 minutes she succeeded on booking the appointment.
A bot would have stuck to the script.
The service rep who came out had no info on the troubleshooting that had been done or the time of the outage. I gave him a recap, and he skipped a repeat, and replaced the cable box. A bot would have wasted an extra 20 minutes of my time.
Based on NFSE/OFSE moderator posts, and several of my own Seller Support Amazon responses, I thought they were already well into rolling out the AI/BOTs.
Many of these offshore employees working in call centers are brighter and better educated than US employees in call centers. Call centers are often the best job they can find. Were they located here, they would have better jobs/
These often are people worthy of respect, and their self respect often requires they act.
And when I treat them with respect, it sometimes helps get better results.
And, they are doing a ‘wonderful’ job. I just got tagged that a response had been made to one of few ( /S ) posts and found a new BOT doing a great job.
They thanked several people for their posts and I did find one amusing –
from Dawn_AMZ_456
The amusing part is that the ONLY post from sunnyfarmsales was an attempt at trolling MY response by saying – " Can he? His seller account is a year old with less than 30 feedback. I wouldn’t exactly call him a longtime expert, just a retiree with a lot of time on his hands to comment on every forum post."
I did have to ask the BOT how they set their ‘high’ standards…
I find it funny he spent the time to look into you to attack your credibility, but got very basic facts about you wrong because he doesn’t know how feedback is displayed.
