What I’m about to discuss with you is very scary…

A few years back we got a loan from Zopa for home improvements, and we’ve been saving hard to pay it off early to save on interest charges.

At the weekend we finally had enough to settle it. But they were closed, so we communicated with their bot.

We we’re expecting to be told someone will contact us on Monday. But no!

The bot. Not only found our account details. It emailed the redemption figure, complete with details on the options to pay.

We BACs the money, thinking it would take until Tuesday for it to be confirmed.

Imagine our surprise when we received a final email saying:

‘Congrats. You’ve repaid your loan early. Your payment has landed safely in our system. Thank you for being a brilliant customer’.

All this happened within a 2-hour window on a Saturday afternoon, without any human interaction.

Wow! That’s very scary!

And it shows you how some of the larger companies are accelerating their use and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) software.

It would be interesting to understand if Zopa activated this level of service very recently, and if these types of artificial intelligence implementations are leading to employee redundancies.

Don’t get me wrong. The level of service was amazing.

But if it’s at the cost of people’s lively hood. It would leave me feeling something’s going horrible wrong.

Our business (office technology solutions) is built on Simple Honest Service delivered personally by a fantastic team of people, who uphold these values for our customers.

…for me, people buy from people they can trust, not AI robots.