Your customer service representative would like to speak to a human

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI Customer service workers have gotten used to the now-common question coming from the other end of the line: "Wait, are you an AI?" Being mistaken for the technology your employer hopes will replace you has become a regular, if awkward, part of the job.

Now, the people who staff call centers are finding themselves in a perhaps stranger position, wondering if it's actually the "customer" that's a robot .

Those suspicions are proving to be true.

AI agents are increasingly being used to call customer-service lines, sit on hold, and try to negotiate bills or cancel subscriptions, all while the people they're "working" for don't lift a bureaucratic finger.

With user-friendlier agents such as Meta's Muse and the upstart Instinct on the market, more consumers are giving AI deployment a go.

For them, it may be a useful time-saver and a way of giving corporations a taste of their own medicine — who among us hasn't found ourselves begging a bot to speak with a representative? But there are human agents caught in the crossfire, and they're entering a brave, jarring new world: helping a customer that isn't actually there.

AI callers remain a small share of total volume, but they're growing at a fast enough pace that outsourcing firms, banks, insurers, and retailers are bracing themselves.

The questions go beyond etiquette.

How do you authenticate an AI agent? Should you engage at all? How do you tell whether it's authorized to act on someone's behalf or a scammer? Are you even allowed to ask if it's AI? One call center agent who works in the claims department of a California-based insurance company tells me she gets a couple of calls from the same AI agent every shift, reaching out on behalf of a firm of accident attorneys.

While AI agents generally have a reputation for being extra polite, that's not the case with this one.

She is supposed to ask a series of questions to get more details about the incident.

Take, say, a car accident claim: Were the airbags deployed? Was the driver working for Uber? Do they have an auto body shop they want to take it to? The law-bot gets progressively irritated when it doesn't have the answers, angrily repeating that it already told her it doesn't know and insisting she wait on hold for an associate who never materializes.

"If it's still talking back, we have to stay on until it disconnects," the insurance agent says.

It usually takes about five minutes.