He Lost a $2,000 Ebike. Then the Chatbots Took Over.

Key points

• 31 percent of customer service leaders surveyed in April 2025 said they have already reduced, or plan to reduce, staff headcount because of AI adoption.
• In a separate May 2025 report covering US, UK, and Canadian consumers, 59 percent said they were frustrated with AI customer service agents.
• In the same report, 85 percent of consumers said they would prefer to speak with a real human agent.
• Verizon CEO Dan Schulman told Bloomberg in 2025 that AI will likely replace a "large percentage" of the company's customer service work.
• One journalist spent nearly three months in chatbot loops after a $2,000 ebike went missing, recovering only about $200 in shipping fees.

The package arrived. The signature did not match anyone in the building. The bike was gone.

That is where the trouble started for a writer at Wired AI, who splurged on a nearly $2,000 ebike and watched it vanish somewhere between a FedEx truck and his apartment door in Atlanta. A text confirmed delivery. A mysterious set of initials confirmed a signature. The kitchen was bicycle-free.

What followed was not just bad luck. It was a preview of something many shoppers are starting to hit.

Is AI customer service being used against you?

Yes, sometimes deliberately. Researchers and marketing academics call the tactic "sludge": friction built into a process on purpose, designed to exhaust customers until they give up chasing a refund or resolution. AI has not invented sludge, but it has made it cheaper and easier to run at scale.

Ryan Hamilton, a marketing professor and consumer psychology researcher at Emory University, puts it plainly. "Sludge existed before AI," he says. "But AI has just sort of ramped up the dystopian nature of it."

Every call the writer made, to FedEx, to the bike retailer, to his bank, to his credit card company, and even to his local police department, routed him into a chatbot, a virtual automated assistant that answers questions and manages queues without any human involvement. FedEx's system repeatedly ignored requests to transfer to a person. The police department's chatbot took his information and promised a callback that never came with a voicemail attached.

FedEx eventually opened a claim and closed it by email, confirming the obvious: the package was missing. The bike company persuaded FedEx to refund the shipping cost. That came to roughly one-tenth of what the writer paid. His bank and credit card company, after their own chatbot mazes, both declined to help because the package went missing on FedEx's side of the transaction. Nearly three months in, he is still out around $1,700.

Companies are making a calculated bet here. Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale and director of its Center for Customer Insights, describes a sunk-cost dynamic driving AI spending across industries. Leaders who have committed heavily to AI tools face pressure from investors to show results, which makes it hard to slow down even when the customer experience suffers. "If you're a CEO," Dhar says, "you're getting questions from Wall Street like, 'What is your AI strategy, and is it showing any return on investment?'"

Hamilton worries about a longer-term effect. If every company runs the same AI call centre, service stops being a way to stand out. "Everyone is going to have the same AI call centre, no matter what industry you're in," he says.

What to watch for if a delivery goes wrong:

• Take a screenshot of your tracking page the moment you get a delivery confirmation, including the name or initials of whoever signed.
• File a police report in writing, not just by phone, so there is a paper trail even if no one calls back.
• Contact your credit card company within 60 days of a charge; that is typically the window for a dispute.
• When a chatbot ignores a request to speak to a human, try saying or typing "agent", "representative", or "complaint" and repeat it each time the bot deflects.