Couldnt agree more. The Federal Government should be restrained to its Constitional authority. I don't see anywhere in there a clause that the government should be involved in maintaining retirement accounts.
Aside from that even though, it's bad economics. It's government centrally planning retirement accounts and we all know that central planning isnt just immoral and inherently corrupt by design, it is PAINFULLY ineffective at doing whatever it is trying to do.
You and I are smart enough to understand that is the implication. Libertarians have been trying to get a crowbar under this one for ages by pointing that out and have had basically no success. Social Security is still a very popular program even if its stupid.
Most of the requests made of helpdesk people are very simple like "please change the phone number associated with my account." Companies save a lot of money and can reduce risk by automating simple tasks like that. I work for a large company that uses this technology and it has improved our end-user experience dramatically, resulting in an increase in sales. Before you would be chatting with someone from Bangladesh and they would fuck your order up a greater amount of the time than this system does because they usually don't speak English that well. These bots can be tailored to each language and the user can just pick whatever language they want.
Also, on the point of making it not human-like, that may make it difficult for some people to interact with which would defeat the purpose. Having to learn a whole bunch of commands just to do a simple thing like cancel your sub or change your phone number would be very tedious. Anthropomorphization of the bot helps humans relate to it what they are trying to do.
I don't know who is responsible but the timing is all too coincidental.