Your Customers Are About to Fire Your Help Center
Plus: Uber Eats shows what “just handle it” CX looks like
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📅 February 17, 2026 | ⏱️ 5 min read
Good Morning!
Today, we’re talking about why “modernizing service” isn’t a channel move anymore. It’s a workflow move. Consumer AI is starting to do real tasks, not just answer questions.
Look at Uber Eats building an entire grocery cart from a simple request, then helping you handle substitutions without turning it into a scavenger hunt. We’ve also got fresh ROI numbers that explain why leaders are pushing harder on automation, and what this shift means when customers start expecting “just handle it” moments instead of five screens and a support maze.
🧠 THE DEEP DIVE: ByteDance Turns Doubao 2.0 Into a “Do Stuff” Consumer Assistant
The Big Picture: ByteDance released Doubao 2.0, pushing its consumer chatbot past Q&A and into multi-step task help.
What’s happening:
Doubao 2.0 is being pitched as “less talking, more doing.” Think: find it, compare it, book it, fix it.
The pitch also leans on cost and scale. That matters when a consumer app wants to be a daily habit, not a fun demo you forget.
The real battle is repeat use. If it actually finishes tasks, people keep coming back. If not, it gets deleted right after the first disappointment.
Why it matters: Consumer AI is raising the bar for everyone. When customers get used to saying one thing and getting it handled, they stop tolerating five screens, three logins, and a support maze that ends with “please wait.”
The takeaway: Don’t start with “Where can we add a chatbot?” Start with your top five “just handle it” moments (refund, reorder, change address, reschedule, claim status). For each one: aim for one request, one quick check, one done.
Source: Reuters
More about Dubao: Wired
📊 CX BY THE NUMBERS: The New ROI Benchmarks For AI-First Service
Data Source: Deloitte Digital, “The Future of Service: the Age of Intelligent Experience,”
43% of orgs think AI could cut contact center costs by 30%+ in the next three years. Translation: someone is already putting this in a slide deck for your CFO.
64% say AI boosted agent productivity. Early wins are still about helping humans move faster, not replacing them.
39% say cost per contact dropped. Good. But only if “containment” doesn’t turn into “customer gave up and left.”
The Insight: The ROI story isn’t “buy AI, save money.” It’s “run service like a system.” If you can’t govern content, measure outcomes, and tune the journey, you’ll get short-term savings and long-term regret.
🧰 THE AI TOOLBOX: Uber Eats Cart Assistant
What it does: Builds a grocery cart from a simple request (and in some versions, a list), using your preferences and past orders so you don’t have to hunt item by item.
CX Use Cases:
Cuts friction in a high-stress journey: Grocery is full of tiny choices. Fewer taps means fewer drop-offs and fewer “I’ll do this later” abandons.
Handles the hardest moment: substitutions: When items are out of stock, a good assistant can suggest swaps fast, which helps protect trust in the order experience.
Why this matters for CX pros:
This is a clean example of where AI actually earns its keep: it shrinks the work customers hate. Not “chat for chat’s sake,” but real progress toward an outcome. For CX teams, the lesson isn’t “go build a cart bot.” The lesson is the pattern: pick a messy, repetitive customer job and use AI to do the boring parts, then force a quick review step so customers stay in control. Convenience wins, but control keeps trust.
Source: The Verge
⚡ SPEED ROUND: Quick Hits
Alibaba Unveils Qwen 3.5 Model For ‘Agentic AI Era’ — More “do-it-for-me” consumer AI means your self-service flows will feel slow unless you simplify them.
Chinese AI Models Flood Spring Festival As New Consumer Agents Launch — Consumer agents are showing up fast, and every new one teaches customers to expect fewer steps and faster results.
AI Assistant Use Doubles As More Shoppers Tap AI To Handle The Buying Process — Shopping is getting more conversational, which means “being the answer” inside AI tools is becoming a real CX fight.
📡 THE SIGNAL: The “Do Stuff” Standard Is Now The Baseline
Customers are being trained, fast, to expect one request and a finished job. That’s the new bar. Not a slick conversation. Not a friendly tone. A completed task. And when that expectation hits your world, every extra screen, every repeated verification, every “we’ve sent a link to your email” feels like your company is wasting their time on purpose.
The leadership move isn’t to chase every agent trend. It’s to pick the moments where “just handle it” creates real loyalty, then wrap them in guardrails: clear confirmation steps, reversible actions, and measurements that track success, not just containment. The goal is not automation. The goal is a journey that feels effortless but still accountable.
If customers are upgrading their expectations daily, what are you upgrading first: your assistant’s capabilities, or your experience’s trust controls? See you tomorrow.
See you tomorrow.
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