“I feel like they don’t care enough to have a flesh and blood human being talk to me.”
Leave me alone
Are you ready for an AI-automated future? If you’re not, you don’t have a choice, because landlords are coming in fast.
While they haven’t yet taken the real estate industry by storm, as The New York Times reports, some property management companies are using AI chatbots to field inquiries and complaints from current and prospective tenants.
Just like any good landlord, these bot barons will do the dirty work of exacting rent payments, and it’s up to the customer whether they want to do it in their usual cheery AI tone or a stern voice.
The chatbots are offered by companies like New York-based EliseAI, which serves about 2.5 million apartment owners across the U.S., according to The New York Times. CEO Min-Na Song told the paper that the chatbots aim to be as human as possible, and may be a little good at playing the role.
“When people come into the leasing office, they call out Ellis by name and ask about him,” Song said.
Poor customer service
Some tenants are not too happy with their new agency overlords. For software programmer Lei Wen, this makes the already difficult apartment search even more stressful. He often had to talk to an AI about renting a room, but the AI’s answers were vague and repetitive. Even when he went in person, he was responsible for the guided tour himself.
“I’d rather have a human interaction,” Wen told The New York Times. “Signing a lease is a big commitment,” adding, “When it’s all automated, I feel like they don’t care enough about it to have a live human talk to me.”
At the very least, these AIs are on standby 24/7. Gone are the days of being ignored by your landlord when you have a problem that needs fixing. On the other hand, tenants might feel a bit insulted when, after complaining about a leaking pipe, the cheery chatbot simply sends them a video on how to find the stop valve, as in one example of EliseAI’s capabilities cited by The New York Times.
Full Disclaimer
Introducing AI chatbots into customer service raises a number of thorny issues: What if the AI ​​chatbot confidently gives residents the wrong information or makes promises that human agents can’t deliver on?
We’re already seeing examples of how this could play out: Earlier this year, Air Canada was forced to pay damages to a man who bought a ticket after its AI lied about getting a refund for the airline’s bereavement policy.
It’s also a murky issue as to whether a chatbot needs to declare up front that it’s an AI — EliseAI doesn’t, because there’s no law requiring it. It feels a bit unpolished, and some experts think it’s probably best to be honest in this area if landlords want to restore what little trust they have with their tenants.
“All things considered, it would be better to have the bot announce at the outset that it’s a computer assistant,” Alex John London, a professor of ethics and computational technology at Carnegie Mellon University, told The New York Times.
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