She introduced herself as Eve, but Ben knew right away that the voice on the other end of the line was a bot. Eve knew his name. She also knew how much money he\u2019d owed a former landlord ($266). She didn\u2019t seem to know that he\u2019d settled with a collection agency five months prior. Eve said she was an AI agent from ProCollect and was calling to collect a debt. \u201cWould you like to resolve it today by card or bank transfer?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
Ben had stepped outside on a balmy April afternoon in Portland, Oregon, to take the phone call. (He asked that WIRED use a pseudonym so he could speak freely about a financial issue.) As he stood in the sun, he wondered what he\u2019d have to say to make Eve hand off a call to a human. \u201cI figured it was just going to kick me over to a person when I asked about repayment structure or anything more technical,\u201d he says. But Eve stayed on the line, so Ben did, too. He decided\u2014why not?\u2014to mess with the bot a little.<\/p>\n
Ben says he asked the bot to engage in some role-play, in which he was \u201cjust a little guy\u201d and his debt was like a giantess prone to trampling him. He wanted to see how weird Eve would get. The bot haltingly played along for a few minutes, he says, but then abruptly punted him to a call center employee. The human agent didn\u2019t disclose whether they\u2019d heard Ben\u2019s bizarre conversation with the AI. They did, however, quickly clear up the confusion: \u201cThey looked me up in the system,\u201d he recalls. \u201cFound that the balance was zero.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ben\u2019s experience is increasingly common. As inflation and stagnant salaries squeeze pocketbooks, debt delinquency in the United States is swelling.<\/a> \u201cWe have, right now, the highest amount of collections in the courts that I’ve ever seen,\u201d says debt settlement expert Michael Bovee.<\/p>\n As an unprecedented number of people struggle to repay debtors, the companies chasing down debts are turning to technology to amp up their efforts. Many of the calls, emails, texts, and letters people receive asking for money are now carried out by AI agents. Their tone may be deferential, even sycophantic, but they never fly off the handle. They also never sleep. Their edge comes from persistence and scale. An analysis<\/a> by the collections agency Kaplan Group estimates that AI debt collectors will be an industry worth nearly $16 billion within the next decade.<\/p>\n AI boosters often stress that, as automation becomes more sophisticated, humanity has a rare chance to get rid of the worst gigs in the world. Working at a call center already sucks. Working at a call center specifically to hound people for money compounds the misery. Career matching platform CareerExplorer ranks<\/a> debt collection in the bottom 1 percent of professions for job satisfaction. As much as debt collectors hate their jobs, people also hate debt collectors. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau first began accepting complaints about debt collection, it received<\/a> 11,000 within six months, putting it just behind the mortgage industry as the financial service that provoked the most ire.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s any employment sector that could go poof without too much fuss over job loss, it might just be this one. For a bot like Eve, what does it take to beat the least-liked people on Earth?<\/p>\n To get a better handle on Eve\u2019s capabilities, I decided to call her myself.<\/p>\n But when I tried the number Ben gave me, a human ProCollect employee answered. I identified myself as a journalist. They told me that no one was around to answer my questions and suggested I call back the next day. When I did, another human told me that the company does not use AI but also that I should talk to human resources. HR told me to email my questions, which I did. One of my queries: Where did Eve come from?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She introduced herself as Eve, but Ben knew right away that the voice on the other end of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52159,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,30783,25,7537,1151,14955,3842],"class_list":["post-52158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-ai-panic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-finance","tag-longreads","tag-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}