Not long ago, an unhappy buyer, “Angela M.,” took to Yelp to give her home builder a one-star review and went into detail about all the things that went wrong at close of escrow.
She wasn’t one of those crazy reviewers trying to damage anyone’s reputation; she had good reasons to be upset and truly believed she had no other choice but to leave that review.
What happened next in this age of artificial intelligence follows, and it may surprise you:
No chatbots were deployed. No automated “we care about your feedback” messages were sent. Instead, a real person read the review and picked up the phone to call Angela about her concerns. A few days later, she went back on Yelp and updated her review to five stars.
There’s no rocket science behind making someone feel heard, but it runs counter to everything being pitched to builders these days about AI. Whether it’s chatbots for sales, automated warranty processing, or virtual assistants for homeowner portals, they all promise the same things—faster, cheaper, and easier.
In production home building, these are important benefits to your company. But Angela didn’t need any of that in the moment. She needed to feel heard.
In our race to automate the home buying experience, we need to be very careful how we use AI. In addition to asking “Where can we use AI?” we also need to ask, “Where should we never let AI take the place of a human?”
Backlash Against Bots
Other industries are already feeling pushback, similar to the fallout that came after automated phone answering systems went mainstream in the 1990s. Today, new data shows customers are directing their anger at AI.
A 2026 CX Trends Report found that 75% of customers were frustrated with AI customer service. The rush to invest in AI and automation has led to customers reporting more dead ends, more infinite loops, and more repeating themselves. Phone trees 2.0.
Here are some other stats illustrating the backlash, courtesy of the 2026 Parloa Consumer Patience Index:
- 55.4% of consumers admitted to crying, yelling at loved ones, or breaking a device after a frustrating AI-driven support interaction;
- 17% admit they resort to swearing and profanity at chatbots out of sheer desperation;
- Only 7.8% of respondents are extremely confident that automated systems can accurately understand and resolve their requests, and;
- 30.4% have no trust in AI’s ability to handle complex service interactions at all.
Even the automotive industry, which is often compared to the building industry, is ditching the now-old chatbot model. Executives from major brands are openly pushing back against top-down AI mandates.
And Chad Anderson, the head of Customer Care for Mercedes-Benz USA, boiled it down: “Customers aren’t begging for AI; they’re begging for better experiences.”