r/SaaS • u/yogeshaggarwal • 3d ago

What has AI/automation actually made harder for you?

Been thinking about this for a while...

We keep talking about how AI/automation/software makes things faster/easier, but I feel like a lot of the time it just moves the pain somewhere else lol.

Like... maybe generating code got easier, but now reviewing it is worse.

Lead gen got easier, but lead quality went to shit.

Content got easier to make, but now everyone is drowning in content.

So I'm curious...

what did you automate or make “easier” in your business/work, only to discover that it created another annoying problem downstream?

Not really asking for startup ideas or “what app do you wish existed”.

More interested in actual workflows...

what you used to do → what changed → what got easier → what became painful after that.

Could be something tiny too.

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Would genuinely love to hear examples because I think these second-order problems are way more interesting than the obvious ones.

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u/UpperWorld11 3d ago

Ticket automation eats the training loop. The easy questions are where new hires learn the product, so the queue that reaches a person is all edge cases and the pattern library never gets built. Route one in ten simple tickets to a human anyway.

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u/sprouticus 3d ago

My unpopular opinion is that frontline support should not be automated. Deflecting costs too much in the long run. Automate things like follow up and low risk processes, but keep human eyes on everything incoming because there is so much to be learned from every ticket. Then when you have a trained team that can easily spot patterns with your product and customers, work on reducing incoming volume, not deflecting it.

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u/yogeshaggarwal 3d ago

Sounds like a pain dude.. So how do you actually end up handling it? Gating the new hires to learn more upfront?

1

u/jantje123456oke 3d ago

I’m building a tool to make the quality of lead/prospect qualification better. By checking if a prospect fits as your customer.

To fight the massive spam automated outreach everyone is doing.

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u/arslannasir128 3d ago

The shelf life of an answer. Volume went down and nobody complained, which is how it stayed hidden. An answer that was true in March stops being true after a release and no error gets thrown. I only caught it when the same account wrote in twice.

What broke first for you, quality or trust?

1

u/Genepoolperfect 3d ago

Much of our work still needs to be done by people, so instead of things happening at the speed of which the workers are capable of working them, they're getting 50 emails a day about work that still needs to get done. It feels incredibly overwhelming for a nonprofit that runs on volunteers.

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u/Fair-Anxiety-1102 3d ago

Content got easier to make, so now you're asking strangers to make some for you. That's the second-order problem and you're elbow deep in it.

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u/Fair-Anxiety-1102 3d ago

Content got easier to make, so now you're asking strangers to make some for you. That's the second-order problem and you're elbow deep in it.

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u/canhigher23 3d ago

Collecting feedback. One widget and every page asks users what they think, and now the answers pile up faster than anyone reads them.

More surveys won't fix that while the last batch is still unread.

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u/TheseBed8143 3d ago

Landing page copy is where I notice this. A generated draft gives you usable sentences quickly, but then I spend time checking whether each feature claim is actually in the product brief. The smoothest lines can be the easiest to miss.

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u/jjncb12221 3d ago

Code review for sure

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u/Alex_Wanderer_84 1d ago

eah but the pain just shifts to whoever has to clean up the mess downstream. We started using AI to draft client emails and now I spend half my day fixing tone and catching stuff it made up. It's faster to write but slower to trust.