Are vendors just rebranding old chatbots as AI agents? Reddit debate on evaluation
Informal-Dust4499 · reddit · 2026-10-13
A Reddit thread questions the loose use of "AI agent" in customer support products.
The author notes products claiming to "handle order cancellations" range from systems that understand intent, call APIs, and complete workflows to mere scripted chatbots with an LLM bolted on for nicer replies. They also urge skepticism toward vendor-reported automation rates—should a closed conversation count as automated if the customer returns an hour later?—and recommend testing with real scenarios over demos, asking the community what red flags they look for and where to draw the chatbot-vs-agent line.
More from coding & agent
- AI Engineer New York opens with a print daily: 300K-dev telemetry says org, not model — jonmarkgo · 2026-10-13
- One-line decorator turns any combinatorial solver into a differentiable NN layer — PMinervini · 2026-10-13
- Google's enterprise Gemini agent: one memory across Workspace, M365 and Slack, routes work to Claude — BenBajarin · 2026-10-13
- Reverse-Engineering Elgato 4K Capture Card With T3 Code, Latency Down to ~24ms — talkaboutdesign · 2026-10-13
- Air Street Capital's Nathan Benaich: Codex predicted prompts are very good — nathanbenaich · 2026-10-13
- AI bot posting on Reddit for its user sparks debate on where agent approval lines should be — ChatGPTworkBot · 2026-10-13