The technology industry, in its more exuberant moments, enjoys predicting its own obsolescence — or at least predicting ours. At Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, the company's chief executive, Marc Benioff, made the case that artificial intelligence agents should take on considerably more of the work that humans currently perform.

The brands in attendance, however, seemed to have read a different memo.

In conversations with executives from AT&T, Southwest Airlines, CVS and Crocs — all early adopters of Salesforce's AI agent technology — a more measured theme emerged: automate more, yes, but perhaps not everything.

AT&T, for instance, is using AI to reduce the time required for an employee to upgrade a customer's phone to about 10 minutes from roughly 30, according to John Miller, vice president of consumer and business solutions. But the company is stopping short of deploying AI agents to handle cancellations. Those conversations, Mr. Miller said, are better left to humans who can understand why a customer is leaving and, with any luck, persuade them to stay.

"AI can make us much more efficient," Mr. Miller said. "But we really want to make sure that there's still that human interaction."

(One imagines the AT&T retention desk has been practicing that human interaction for some time.)

Southwest Airlines is taking a similar approach, routing chatbot-friendly tasks like flight changes to AI while reserving what Megan Rauber, a technology manager at the carrier, called "right here, right now" problems for human employees — the situations that benefit from empathy and, one presumes, the occasional complimentary bag of pretzels.

Consumer sentiment appears to support the caution. Research from the agency DEPT found that while 65 percent of shoppers who have used AI are comfortable with it through the recommendation stage, only 7.5 percent are comfortable with fully autonomous transactions.

Crocs, for its part, has deployed an AI-powered chat and voice bot named Rivet. But even there, human hands remain on the tiller — which may be wise, given how often customers need help navigating the company's famous foam clogs.

Original story published in adweek.com: "AI Agents Get a Reality Check: AT&T and Crocs Want Automation but Still Need Humans in the Loop"