The customer service Turing Test

Published August 22, 2025 12:55am ET



I was in the middle of one of those customer service “chats” yesterday when I violated one of my deeply held personal rules. I am moving to a new place, and I had a very simple question: Does my current internet service provider offer the same product at my new address? What I imagined, in what I now realize was a haze of foolish optimism, was a one-minute exchange in which I tell the person on the other end of the chat (or, I guess, in the age of AI, “person” on the other end of the chat) my new address, and then that person or “person” checks it against a master list and comes back with an answer.

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