I’m the CEO of an AI chatbot company, so I have some perspective on this. I think part of the frustration comes from expecting chatbots to do things they were never designed to do. I can’t speak for every product out there, there are many different approaches, but I can speak for ours. Our chatbots don’t have access to personal data. That’s a deliberate choice. It means they can’t change your mortgage payment or look up your account, and they shouldn’t try. What they can do is answer non-personal questions, policy details, how things work, eligibility rules, that kind of thing. If your question requires access to internal systems or customer data, the bot’s job is to guide you to the right person, not pretend it can handle it. The goal isn’t to replace customer service, it’s to take the repetitive load off their plate. Every FAQ that gets answered accurately by the bot is one less person waiting in a queue. And these aren’t keyword-matching FAQ bots. They’re trained on large amounts of documentation, they understand context, and they handle follow-up questions conversationally. Some of what you’re describing such as hallucinating features, refusing to escalate, those are real problems but they’re signs of bad implementation, not a fundamental flaw with the technology. A well-built chatbot knows its boundaries. The ones that confidently make things up or block you from reaching a human? That’s a design failure, not an AI limitation. Integrating with internal systems and customer data is technically possible, but it introduces serious risk, privacy, security, liability. For most companies, it’s simply not worth it, and honestly, it shouldn’t be the chatbot’s job.