AI Playbook

Your next customer service call might not have a human on the other end, and that could be a good thing. Fortune's AI editor Jeremy Kahn examines how AI phone agents are reshaping customer support, how they could outperform humans, and where they still fall short. The future of the call center is here, but is it ready for your most frustrating problems?

Hate the Dial Tone? Press 0 for AI Support! | Fortune AI Playbook

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You've reached the customer service hotline. Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Spanish. Aren't you tired of the dial tone? Press 0 to speak to AI. AI phone agents are here. So what do you need to know? I'm Jeremy Kahn, your AI expert at Fortune. I'm here to help cut through some of the hype around AI and to answer your questions. AI agents are making rapid inroads into customer service. It's thought that within a few years, they will resolve the vast majority of customer issues without human intervention. The global conversational AI market is expected to reach $50 billion by 20. So what are the advantages? Number 1, it eliminates language barriers. You can speak to the AI agent in any language you want. The AI agents are fluent in all of them. Number 2, AI delivers professional customer service 24/7. You don't have to wait anymore to call the customer service line when it's open between the hours of 9 and 5. And what's more, because AI can handle multiple calls simultaneously, the wait times are significantly reduced. Number 3, increased customer satisfaction. AI significantly reduces the time it takes to resolve routine customer issues. And in studies, a vast majority of people said that they would rather deal with an AI agent than wait for a human representative. So what are the drawbacks? Despite its capabilities, AI agents can't handle every situation. If your problem is particularly unusual or complex, it still might take a human to resolve. And don't forget about AI hallucinations. Hallucination is the term for when AI models invent erroneous information. And when you're dealing with customer issues, that can be a real problem. There was a case where Canada was sued by a customer in 2024 because a chatbot on its site that was providing customer support invented some erroneous information about whether a particular airfare was refundable. The chatbot said it was, it turned out it wasn't. The customer sued and the judge said Air Canada was liable.

AI isn't just answering your questions, it's selling to you. Fortune's AI editor Jeremy Kahn explains the new era of hyper-personalized advertising; from chatbot-embedded ads, to AI agents quietly pushing sponsored products. Learn how brands are targeting you, why you might not even notice, and what the rise of AI ads means for consumers.

How AI Ads Are Making You Spend More | Fortune AI Playbook

So have you been seeing a lot of ads lately that you suspect are made by AI? You're probably right. We're in a new era of AI advertising, and it's all about hyper personalization that includes the ads that you see on social media, which are going to be more and more targeted, and it also includes your conversations with chatbots, which is a whole new category of advertising. I'm Jeremy Kahn, your AI expert at Fortune. I'm here to help cut through some of the hype around AI and to answer your questions. A recent study from BCG, the consulting group, found that shopping-related Gen AI use grew by more than a third in 2025. OpenAI has said it's going to start showing ads in the free version of chat GPT, and Google has talked about adding ads to its Gemini chatbot. Here are 3 ways AI is transforming advertising. Number 1, in-answer ads. This is when you're having a conversation with a chatbot and it detects that you're interested in shopping for something, and it's going to display an ad baked directly into the response it's providing. Number 2. In conversation ads, this is when you're having a conversation with a chatbot and it again decides that you're interested in buying something. It's going to bring up an ad for that product, but it's going to display it alongside the conversation in some sort of banner or pop-up. It's a lot more obvious in this case that it is an advertisement. Number 3, agentic ads. These are ads that aren't actually intended. For people, instead they're intended for this new class of AI shopping agents that people are increasingly going to turn to to do the shopping for them. The idea is that the agent will see the ad and be influenced in terms of what it's going to buy for you by the ad, but it's not intended for you to see. So what do you need to look out for first, synthetic influencers. Deep fake personas. Our buying decisions are heavily influenced by online content creators or celebrity endorsements, but increasingly we have to watch out for the idea that someone may have created a deep fake, an AI generated image of those people. And it's not necessarily the case that the real people have endorsed that product. Second, overpersonalization and data privacy. People are already concerned about data privacy in the era of social media, but with AI it's like social media on steroids. When people have conversations with chatbots, they reveal much more intimate information about their lives than they might have on social media. For instance, they might be revealing information about medical conditions, about their mental health, about their relationships with their friends and family. And now advertisers potentially have access to all that information and can use it to target you with advertising. Third, AI hallucinations. Hallucinations is the term for when an AI model makes up information that isn't true. In the context of advertising and shopping, that could include incorrect information about a product, what its features are, how much it costs, where it's available. The Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, has talked about trying to crack down on false advertising in AI generated ads.

There's a new role taking over the tech world. Fortune's AI editor Jeremy Kahn explores the rise of the AI Architect: what they do, what they're earning, and why demand for this position is exploding. Are you thinking about a career move in tech? This one might be for you.

Is the AI Architect the Next Hot Job? | Fortune AI Playbook

You may have heard about this job called AI architects. Is this the next hot job title? I'm Jeremy Kahn, your AI expert at Fortune. I'm here to help cut through some of the hype around AI and to answer your questions. So what exactly is an AI architect? Number 1, it's a real person. It's someone who designs and builds and then supervises AI systems and infrastructure. Number 2, what are an AI architect's responsibilities? Well, the person doesn't just train AI models, they design the entire workflow. So they choose what data the AI model is going to use, which model to use, what infrastructure to run that model on, and they decide what the. guardrails are going to be around how that model is run, how it's monitored, and how it's improved in the future. They have to be fluent in AI, machine learning, data, and business all at once. Number 3, key differentiators. AI architects are different than data scientists. Data scientists usually just find the data, clean it up, maybe they analyze it, but they don't design the whole AI workflow. AI architects are also different from machine. Learning engineers. Machine learning engineers know how to train an AI model and deploy it, but they don't generally design the entire workflow, and they aren't fluent in the business processes and rationale behind that workflow. Are AI architects the next big thing in tech? Well, demand for the role has been growing extremely fast, more than doubling in the past year if you look at data from sites like LinkedIn or Indeed. So what's the salary range for the job? Well, on average, it's About $150,000 US dollars, but the range is quite broad and goes up to twice that as a base salary plus equity and bonuses. So what are the skills or credentials required for the role? Well, most people come from either a machine learning background or a data science background, but it helps to know business too. It combines the skills of a machine learning engineer, a data scientist, a developer, and a product manager all in one.

AI coding agents are transforming software development, but are human programmers still necessary? Fortune's AI editor Jeremy Kahn breaks down what "vibe coding" really means, why companies are racing to adopt coding agents, and the hidden risks of AI-generated code. From technical debt to slopsquatting, we’ll explore what the future looks like for software programming – and whether humans will play a role. 

Are Programmers Obsolete? | Fortune AI Playbook

You might have been hearing a lot about AI coding assistance and how this might mean that programmers' jobs are going away. So what's really going on here? I'm Jeremy Kahn, your AI expert at Fortune. I'm here to help cut through some of the hype around AI and to answer your questions. So what are coding agents? Coding agents are AI models that can write computer code. You just tell them in English what you want the computer program to do, and it handles all the coding. Vibe coding involves somebody who is not a programmer just telling an AI model they want to build an app or a website. Site and the AI model does all the programming for them. The adoption of coding agents is happening very fast. Companies like Google are saying that a lot of the code they put out is now written by these coding agents and even more traditional companies, banks like JPMorgan, a lot of their code is also being written by coding agents too. So why does this matter? Number 1, it's redefining the role of the developer. Software programmers no longer have to worry about writing individual lines of code. Instead, their job is more about setting high level features and functions and then supervising and checking what the AI does. Number 2, coding agents lower the technical barrier to entry. Now anybody can write code. You don't have to work for the IT department. Number 3, AI agents can accumulate A lot of technical debt. Technical debt means when a company's legacy computer systems or IT systems cause it problems in the future. With these AI coding agents, they often write code that on the surface looks great, but it can be riddled with cybersecurity vulnerabilities and actually be brittle. Number 4, don't trust AI to remember everything. AI models suffer from a phenomenon called hallucinations. That's when AI models make up. erroneous information in the context of coding assistants, that hallucination can take the form of made up libraries or unit tests. These coding assistants sometimes make up those libraries or they go to libraries that they shouldn't go to, and that's led to this phenomenon called slob squatting. Slob squatting is when you have a bad actor who goes out and registers a library that they think an AI agent might visit, but instead of putting good code in that. Library. They put malware there. The coding agent goes and grabs the malware and imports it back into the network. Back to the original question are software programmers obsolete? Well, autonomous software development is pretty much here today. Engineers at companies like OpenAI and Anthropic say they've gone months without handwriting any code. They just supervise what the AI coding agents do. So what does this mean for people in other professions? Well, there are some people I think that the same kind of automation is coming for every knowledge worker's job in the next 12 to 18 months, but I think that's going to take a lot longer than that. In most other jobs, there aren't something equivalent to unit tests in software where you can automatically tell if the code is good or not. In most other professions, telling whether the work product is good or not requires subjective judgment and a lot of experience, and AI models aren't yet good at that.

AI Playbook

Hate the Dial Tone? Press 0 for AI Support! | Fortune AI Playbook

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Episodes (4 episodes)

Hate the Dial Tone? Press 0 for AI Support! | Fortune AI Playbook

How AI Ads Are Making You Spend More | Fortune AI Playbook

Is the AI Architect the Next Hot Job? | Fortune AI Playbook

Are Programmers Obsolete? | Fortune AI Playbook