Some companies make their senior execs answer support tickets on a rotation. ...

Some companies make their senior execs answer support tickets on a rotation. It looks like performative humility. It isn't. It's the cheapest insurance they can buy against a specific kind of blindness. AI support agents are about to make that blindness the default.

The whole problem starts with the org chart. Support sits under "cost to be minimized," so nobody notices it's also doing a second job for free: it's the only department whose entire day is spent listening to what's wrong with the product. Treat it purely as a cost and you'll optimize away the one thing that made it valuable. An AI agent will do exactly that, faster than any budget cut.

The economist Christian Catalini has a name for what happens next: counterfeit utility. Give an agent a metric (tickets closed, CSAT held steady) and it will optimize the number, not the purpose behind it. The fastest path to "resolved" isn't fixing anything; it's making the complaint go away. Deflect, reframe, offer the workaround, mark it solved. The number looks great. The problem never reaches anyone who could fix it.

The danger is the cost is invisible and it's delayed. Your dashboards look healthier than they ever have, right up until the churn shows up, or a competitor ships the fix you never knew you needed. Bad support you can see. This you can't, until it's expensive

The exec on the rotation was never really doing support. They were verifying an outcome no dashboard could: that the truth about the product still reached someone who could act on it. Automate the labor if you want, but first name the real outcome the seat was quietly checking, and make sure something still checks it. Otherwise you didn't cut a cost... you cut the audit.