We’ve become obsessed with automation, but I think documentation is the real bottleneck
There’s a lot of discussion right now around AI agents and automation in customer support, but something I keep seeing is teams focusing on the AI before fixing the information the AI has access to because in a lot of cases, the technology isn’t the hardest part. The harder part is that company knowledge is usually scattered everywhere. There’s the help center that hasn’t been updated in months, random Slack conversations where important decisions were made, internal docs that only a few people know exist, and years of “tribal knowledge” sitting with specific team members.
Humans can usually work around this because they know who to ask or they’ve built up context over time but when you introduce AI into that environment, all those gaps become much more obvious. if the information is inconsistent, the answers are probably going to be inconsistent too.
I think AI is forcing companies to confront something that was already a problem: a lot of teams don’t have a single source of truth for customer knowledge and maybe the biggest challenge with AI isn’t making it smarter, maybe it’s making sure the business itself is organized enough for AI to help actually.
Has anyone else experienced this after introducing AI into support and did it solve problems immediately, or did it expose bigger issues with documentation and internal processes?