Social security rents its new chatbot. The ex-officials say that it was tested but put aside under Biden.
John McGing could not reach a human. It could be business as usual in this economy, but it was not business; He had called the Social Security Administration, where questions are often not generic and appellants tend to be older, disabled or otherwise vulnerable Americans.
McGing, calling on behalf of his son, had a question in the aid: how to prevent the overpayments that the federal government could later repel. His call was intercepted by a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence.
No matter what he said, the bot has kept answers in generic questions, not the dark question of McGing. “If you have a key press, it didn’t do anything,” he said. Finally, the bot “slipped or anything” and brought it to an agent.
It was a small but revealing incident. With the knowledge of McGing, a former Social Security employee of Maryland, he had met a technological tool recently introduced by the agency. Former long -standing officials and observers of the agency say that the Trump administration has deployed a product that has been tested but deemed not yet ready during the Biden administration.
“With the new administration, they are a bit like, let’s go quickly and later, this with which I do not agree, because you will generate a lot of confusion,” said Marcela Escobar-Alava, who was responsible for social security information under President Joe Biden.
Some 74 million people receive social security benefits; 11 million of these receive disability payments. In a survey conducted last fall, more than a third of the beneficiaries said they would not be able to afford the necessities such as food, clothes or accommodation without him. And yet the agency has enabled employees who serve them: some 6,200 left the agency, its commissioner Tell the legislators in June, and criticism in the congress and elsewhere say that this led to a worse customer service, despite the agency’s efforts to develop new technologies.
Take the new phone bot. At least some beneficiaries do not like it: the social security Facebook page is, from time to time, marked with negative criticisms of the non -cooperative bot, as the agency said in July that almost 41% of calls are treated by the bot.
The agency’s legislators and former employees are concerned about this prefigures less human social security, in which precipitated AI replaces advanced and experienced employees.
Anxieties through festive lines
The concern about the management of the agency is bipartite. In May, a group of House Republicans wrote to Social Security Administration expressing its support for the effectiveness of the government, but warning that their voters had criticized the agency for “inadequate customer service” and suggesting that certain measures can be “too far from”.
The agency commissioner, Frank Bisignano, a former Wall Street executive, is passionate about technology. It has a list of initiatives on which to spend the $ 600 million in New Tech money in the budget request for the 2026 of the Trump administration. He became spanking when asked if his plans mean that he will replace human staff with AI.
“You have referred to the SSA being at a level of personnel of all time; it is also at a technological summit of all time,” he broke a democrat during a room audience at the end of June.
But former social security officials are more ambivalent. In interviews with Kff Health News, people who left the agency – some speaking anonymously for fear of reprisals from the Trump administration and its supporters – said they thought that the new administration was simply rushed on the developed technologies, but not yet deemed ready, by the Biden administration. They also declared that the agency’s dismissal of thousands of employees had led to the loss of experienced technologists who are best equipped to deploy these initiatives and approach their weaknesses.
“The new Social Security AI telephone tool makes people even more difficult for people to get help by phone – and almost impossible if someone needs an American interpreter or translator,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D -MASS.) Told Kff Health News. “We should make the easiest as possible for people to obtain the social security they have won.”
The agency spokesperson did not answer questions from KFF Health News.
The use of AI to automate customer service is one of the most buzzing companies in Silicon Valley. In theory, the new breed of artificial intelligence technologies can respond gently, in a human voice, to almost any question. This is not how the Bot of the Social Security Administration seems to work, the users reporting canned and unrelated responses.
The Trump administration has eliminated certain online statistics that obscure its true performance, said Kathleen Romig, a former agency official who is now director of social policy and disability policy at the center of the left and political priorities. The old website has shown that most of the appellants waited two hours for an answer. From now on, the website does not display waiting times, or for requests for telephone information (once the waiting time for recall is taken into account) or appointment planning.
Although the statistics are published which show that the beneficiaries receive help – that is to say using the AI bot or the agency’s website to accomplish tasks like obtaining a replacement card – Romig said that it thought it was a “very distorted view” overall. Bot AI exams are often poor, she said.
Agency leaders and employees who worked for the first time on the AI product during the Biden administration anticipated these types of difficulties. Escobar-Alava said that he had worked on such a bot, but wanted to clean the policy and regulation data on which she counted first.
“We wanted to ensure that automation produced coherent and precise answers, which was going to take longer,” she said. Instead, it seems that the Trump administration has chosen to introduce the bot first and help out later, said Escobar-Alava.
Romig said that a former executive told him that the agency had used canned FAQs without modifications or nuances to adapt to individual situations and monitored technology to see how it worked. Escobar-Alava said she had heard in the same way.
Could automation help?
For Bisignano, automation and web services are the most effective means of helping program beneficiaries. In a letter to Warren, he said that agency managers “transform the SSA into an agency focused on digital technology who meets customers where they want to be encountered”, making changes that allow the vast majority of calls to be dealt with either automatized or by having a human return to the customer’s call.
The use of these methods also relieves loads on otherwise besieged field offices, Bisignano wrote.
The modification of the telephone experience is not the end of the technological dreams of Bisignano. The agency asked Congress for some $ 600 million in additional funding for investments, which it intended to use for online planning, fraud detection, and much more, according to a list subject to the Chamber at the end of June.
But external experts and former employees said that Bisignano overestimated the novelty of the ideas he presented at Congress. The agency has been updating its technology for years, but that does not necessarily mean that thousands of its workers are suddenly obsolete, said Romig. It is not bad that upgrades continue, she said, but progress has been more progressive than revolutionary.
Certain changes focus on the agency’s public facial madness. Bisignano told the chamber legislators that he supervised an overhaul of the agency’s performance statistics page to highlight the number of automated calls and stop statistics on calling times. He described the latter statistics to “discourage” and suggested that displaying them could dissuade the beneficiaries from calling.
Warren said Bisignano had since said to him privately that he would authorize an “general audit of the Inspector General” of his customer-service quality data and is committed to making a list of information on the performance accessible to the public. The agency has since updated its performance statistics page.
Other changes would have a higher cost and efforts. In April, the agency deployed a security authentication program for direct deposits of deposits, forcing beneficiaries to verify their identity in person if the agency described in regulatory documents as an “automated” analysis system detects anomalies.
According to documents accompanying the proposal, the agency estimated that around 5.8 million beneficiaries are allocated – and this would cost the federal government nearly $ 1.2 billion, mainly motivated by the time of the personnel devoted to assistance to the applicants. The agency requests nearly $ 7.7 billion in the next financial year for the payroll.
Christopher Hensley, a financial advisor in Houston, said that one of his clients called her in May after his bank changed his routing number and that Social Security ceased to pay it, forcing it to borrow money from his family.
It turned out that the agency had reported its account for fraud. Hensley said she had to travel 30 minutes to the nearest social security office to check her identity and correct the problem.
