“Are you actually a human?” The voice of a middle-aged man, thick with anger, roars through the phone. For Lee Eun-young — a pseudonym for a woman in her 40s who works at the customer service desk of a major credit card company — the moment is nothing new. She pauses for a second before replying. “Yes, sir. I’m a human.” This time, the caller does not calm down easily. “Since when did I say I wanted to talk to artificial intelligence (AI)?” he snaps. “You people let machines do all the work while you sit back and collect easy money?” The words sting. But they are not entirely surprising. Roughly one in four calls Lee receives each day now begins with complaints about the company’s AI customer service system. No one at the company has shared the numbers with her. Still, she has a sense of how things are going from the pile of frustrations customers unload the moment they reach a real person. Customer service desk jobs like Lee's are experiencing the future arrive faster than other industries — and it is not a comforting one. For years, the job was widely seen as one o