You’ve felt it. You call a company because your bill is wrong, your service is down, or your account is locked. After navigating a labyrinth of voice menus, you finally get a human. But instead of help, you get a script. The agent has no authority, no tools, and no ability to fix your problem. You hang up, exhausted, and think: “I wish I could just text a bot.”
That’s exactly what British Gas is counting on. This week, the company’s parent Centrica announced it is axing 1,300 call center jobs. The reason? CEO Chris O’Shea claims that “customers prefer AI chatbots.” It’s a masterclass in corporate gaslighting.
They didn’t replace humans with AI. They replaced humans with broken, disempowered husks, and then replaced those husks with AI.
Think about the comparison being made here. We aren’t choosing AI over empowered, well-trained, well-paid customer service agents. We are choosing AI over agents who were deliberately stripped of their authority, micromanaged to the second, and paid poverty wages. It’s a false dilemma designed to make you feel like you won.
For the last decade, companies have waged a quiet war on human service. They slashed training budgets. They took away the software tools agents needed to issue refunds. They forced them to read from rigid scripts designed to upsell you rather than help you. They made human interaction so agonizing that even a mediocre, hallucination-prone chatbot feels like a relief.
Every time you praise a chatbot for being “better” than a human, you are applauding the deliberate sabotage of your own species.
When a CEO stands up and says “customers prefer AI,” what they are actually saying is: “We successfully made our human workforce so useless that you no longer expect us to try.” The preference isn’t organic. It was manufactured by the very cost-cutting that created the vacuum the AI now fills.
And don’t think this ends with call centers. If you work a white-collar job, watch your back. The playbook is already being written. Your employer will slowly strip away your resources, saddle you with bureaucratic friction, and measure your declining performance. When you inevitably fail to hit your numbers, they’ll announce that “clients prefer the efficiency of AI” and hand your desk to a language model.
Customer preference isn’t a trend. It’s a surrender to a rigged game.
We are being conditioned to accept a world where friction is the default, and removing it requires a machine. We deserve competent humans. But as long as we keep accepting the premise that we “prefer” the machine, they will keep firing the humans and calling it progress.
FAQ
Q: Aren't AI bots actually faster for simple tasks?
A: Yes, for a password reset. But for complex disputes, they are a brick wall. The speed comes from avoiding the issue, not solving it.
Q: What's the practical implication for consumers?
A: You will have zero recourse when a company makes a mistake. No human will have the authority to override the system.
Q: Is this just anti-tech Luddism?
A: No. It's anti-sabotage. Empowered humans with good tools beat AI every time. The problem is companies refuse to pay for empowered humans.