I absolutely hate most chatbots. There, I said it.

2025-12-01

I absolutely hate most chatbots. There, I said it. Let’s be honest: we all need support from time to time. Banking apps, airlines, government services, you name it. Ideally, a real human would answer our questions. But at scale, that’s unrealistic. Still, here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud: The main reason we contact support in the first place is because many apps have terrible user experiences. And those two of my major pet peeves:

  1. Crappy user experiences I’ll admit it: in my own products, sometimes UX suffers because I’m a startup founder without a massive budget. Fair enough. But the huge institutions with enormous teams and enormous budgets? They have no excuse. Their UX failures force users into support channels that shouldn’t even be needed.
  2. The chatbot experience itself Most support chatbots today are basically a 1990s telephone menu wearing a new coat of paint. Press 1. Press 2. Press 3. Except now it’s: “Select one of the following numbered options…” It’s the laziest possible user experience. No one likes it. No one wants to use it. But companies deploy it anyway because it’s the path of least resistance. But now we finally have technology that can fix this. LLMs and intelligent agents allow users to explain what they need in natural language and get actual help. No menus. No flowcharts. No guesswork. If you don’t know much about how this works, go watch my Pluralsight courses — I cover it in depth or talk to me. But here’s the core point: I hate bad chatbots. And that’s exactly why I’m working to fix this problem — through better training and better AI assistants. We can do better. And users deserve better.