I was on the phone with a family member recently when he started yelling — actually yelling — at an automated system that was trying to help him resolve a credit card issue. None of the AI prompts made sense for his situation, so he finally resorted to jabbing zero on the keypad until a human picked up.
At a major HR conference a few weeks ago, I saw similar frustration on the faces of dozens of executives. Not anger at the technology itself or resistance to AI adoption, but exhaustion with a persistent gap between what AI promises and its practical reality.
