Why We Replaced Every Chatbot With a Single AI Agent
In January, we shut down 47 automated workflows and handed the keys to one conversational agent. Here is what happened to our support team.
Last winter, our support dashboard looked like a circuit board someone had been soldering for five years straight. Forty-seven distinct automation paths, each built by a different team, each with its own fallback logic and escalation rules. When a customer typed "cancel my account," three separate bots would fire simultaneously, and the customer would get three different responses. We called it the tri-bot problem. Nobody thought it was funny anymore.
The 47-workflow problem
I spent two weeks in February mapping every automated path in our system. The oldest one, a password-reset flow from 2019, had been patched eleven times. The newest was a shipping-lookup integration nobody could explain with confidence.