It looks like a pretty bleak future to me ...
These firms will never accept your bot coming in and no you probably won't switch away.
That could change but it could also get better. Meta announced today that shopping is the top use case for Muse, for items over $200 (more than anticipated). There is a ton of money for retailers who can make their numbers just by being a great agent experience. This honestly could become the primary UX to buy things online, just because current margins require user hostile behavior doesn’t mean they always will.
Have some optimism, it helps activate and create a better future rather than ceding it to the megacorps.
- establish some sort of gateway that requires authentication connected to your personal information where they can rate limit or block you
- use ai of their own to handle the volume of requests (already happening)
why would they stop reacting when money is on the table and the technology to react exists?
Authentication is happening where I live via electronic ID, but once you authenticate you could still use agents on your behalf to compare messages / request public services.
I still envision a deterioration of quality of responses we will be getting. At least in cases where we really need help not something that should have been a button in the first place.
There has already been govt arms outsourcing the agent part to a vendor and it reduced hold times significantly without reducing quality (i.e. its possible)
But each govt arm can mess it up in their own way
I recently had to fight slop responses for months to get a simple bug report through on a public services website. Couple of years ago, I'd have received a "thank you" mail after a day, and the bug would've been fixed by the end of the week.
Now they only react to people that are sufficiently persistent in their arrogance of challenging them. Which isn't much better.
More likely solution is that they will stop handling requests by internet and we will have to show up in person, like we did 20 years ago.