That still exists. The last time I did onsite interviews, every single company that wanted to fly me to their office to interview me asked me to talk to a human agent to book flights. But of course the human agent is just a travel agent with no budgetary power; so I ended up calling the agent to inquire about a booking, then calling the recruiter to confirm that price is acceptable, and then calling the agent book to confirm the booking.

It doesn't have to be this way. Even before the pandemic I remember some companies simply gave me access to an internal app to choose flights where the only flights shown are these of the right date, right airport, and right price.

Yeah, I much prefer using a well designed self service system than trying to explain it over the phone.

The only problem with most of the flights I book now is that they're with low cost airlines and packed with dark patterns designed to push upgrades.

Would an AI salesman be any better though? At least the website can't actively try to pursuade me to upgrade.

An AI agent will likely be worse in that you would have to actively haggle with it so it doesn’t upsell you by default, which IMO is harder than circumnavigating the dark patterns.

An actually useful agent is something that is totally doable with technologies even from a decade ago, which you by necessity need to host yourself, with a sizeable amount of DIY and duct tape, since it won’t be allowed to exist as a hosted product. The purveyor of goods and services cannot bargain with it so it puts useless junk into your shopping cart on impulse. You cannot really upsell it, all the ad impressions are lost on it, and you cannot phish it with ad buttons that look like the UI of your site — it goes in with the sole purpose to make your bookings/arrangements, it’s a quick in-and-out. It, by its very definition and design, is very adversarial to how most companies with Internet presences run things.

I think what we’ll come to widely realize is that syncing state between two minds (in your example, the travel agent’s mind and your mind; more widely, AI agents and their user’s minds) is extremely expensive and slow and it’s gonna be very hard to make these systems good enough to overcome the super low latency of keeping a task contained to a single mind, your own, and just doing most stuff yourself. The CPU/GPU dichotomy as a lens for viewing the world is widely applicable, IME.