Last week, my wife experienced something that would have been impossible to explain to our grandparents: she got ghosted by a chatbot.

Not a dating app. Not a social media influencer. A chatbot on a gourmet food and drinks website. Picture this: It’s 2pm, and my wife decides she’s going to treat us to a nice bottle of wine to go with the gourmet lamb burgers she’s ordered from a leading online food and wine website. She’s earned it. We both have.  She opens her laptop, navigates back to the website, planning to ask the chatbot for advice on which wine to choose to go with the lamb.

But the chatbot’s not there anymore. The cheerful little chat bubble that gave her tips on buying the lamb burgers has vanished. It must be a mistake, she thinks, so she sends the company an email to find out what’s happened.

The response comes back within minutes: “Sorry! Our chat agent will be back online in about 20 minutes.”

Hold on. Agent?
As in… human agent?
As in… there’s an actual person sitting somewhere, taking a break to eat a sandwich before he returns to his job pretending to be a chatbot?

Yes. This is a true story.

This revelation led me down a rabbit hole that would make Alice jealous. My wife told me the story, and incredulous, I started investigating. It turns out the “chatbot” of this leading food and wine store (honestly, I’m too embarrassed for them to name them), is what I now call a “manbot”: a man pretending to be a robot. It’s like method acting, but for customer service.

Think about the economics here for a moment. They could have:

a)    Hired an actual AI chatbot – Works 24/7, never needs coffee breaks, doesn’t take holidays.

b)    Used a human customer service rep – Honest about being human, can have genuine conversations, and can probably offer good advice.

Instead, they chose option c): Pay a human to pretend to be a robot. This is like hiring a person to stand very still and pretend to be a parking meter. Technically possible, but you have to wonder about the decision-making process.

I imagine the board meeting went something like this:
CEO: “We need a chatbot for the website.”
IT Manager: “I can implement an AI solution for about $299 a month.”
Finance Manager: “Hmm. What if we pay Sean $15 an hour to reply when he’s not doing admin?”
CEO: “Brilliant! The personal touch!”
Marketing Manager: “But customers will think it’s AI…”
CEO: “Even better! We get to claim we’re innovative AND traditional!”

And thus was born the world’s most expensive customer service solution. The best part? The “chatbot” went offline right when my wife needed it most, because Sean needs a lunch break, obviously.

Here’s the kicker: When Sean finally came back from his sandwich break (or whatever humans pretending to be chatbots do during downtime), my wife had lost interest. In the meantime she’d gone to the local supermarket to buy the wine there instead.

We got the wine, and the lamb burgers were delicious, but my wife claims it’s the first time she’s been ghosted. And that hurts.