She introduced herself as Eve, but Ben knew right away that the voice on the other end of the line was a bot. Eve knew his name. She also knew how much money he’d owed a former landlord ($266). She didn’t seem to know that he’d settled with a collection agency five months prior. Eve said she was an AI agent from ProCollect and was calling to collect a debt. “Would you like to resolve it today by card or bank transfer?” she asked.
Ben had stepped outside on a balmy April afternoon in Portland, Oregon, to take the phone call. (He asked that WIRED use a pseudonym so he could speak freely about a financial issue.) As he stood in the sun, he wondered what he’d have to say to make Eve hand off a call to a human. “I figured it was just going to kick me over to a person when I asked about repayment structure or anything more technical,” he says. But Eve stayed on the line, so Ben did, too. He decided—why not?—to mess with the bot a little.
Ben says he asked the bot to engage in some role-play, in which he was “just a little guy” and his debt was like a giantess prone to trampling him. He wanted to see how weird Eve would get. The bot haltingly played along for a few minutes, he says, but then abruptly punted him to a call center employee. The human agent didn’t disclose whether they’d heard Ben’s bizarre conversation with the AI. They did, however, quickly clear up the confusion: “They looked me up in the system,” he recalls. “Found that the balance was zero.”
Ben’s experience is increasingly common. As inflation and stagnant salaries squeeze pocketbooks, debt delinquency in the United States is swelling. “We have, right now, the highest amount of collections in the courts that I’ve ever seen,” says debt settlement expert Michael Bovee.
As an unprecedented number of people struggle to repay debtors, the companies chasing down debts are turning to technology to amp up their efforts. Many of the calls, emails, texts, and letters people receive asking for money are now carried out by AI agents. Their tone may be deferential, even sycophantic, but they never fly off the handle. They also never sleep. Their edge comes from persistence and scale. An analysis by the collections agency Kaplan Group estimates that AI debt collectors will be an industry worth nearly $16 billion within the next decade.
AI boosters often stress that, as automation becomes more sophisticated, humanity has a rare chance to get rid of the worst gigs in the world. Working at a call center already sucks. Working at a call center specifically to hound people for money compounds the misery. Career matching platform CareerExplorer ranks debt collection in the bottom 1 percent of professions for job satisfaction. As much as debt collectors hate their jobs, people also hate debt collectors. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau first began accepting complaints about debt collection, it received 11,000 within six months, putting it just behind the mortgage industry as the financial service that provoked the most ire.
If there’s any employment sector that could go poof without too much fuss over job loss, it might just be this one. For a bot like Eve, what does it take to beat the least-liked people on Earth?
To get a better handle on Eve’s capabilities, I decided to call her myself.
But when I tried the number Ben gave me, a human ProCollect employee answered. I identified myself as a journalist. They told me that no one was around to answer my questions and suggested I call back the next day. When I did, another human told me that the company does not use AI but also that I should talk to human resources. HR told me to email my questions, which I did. One of my queries: Where did Eve come from?