Welcome to the Tearsheet Podcast. I'm Zack Miller.

Call volumes into banks have gone up 10x during the pandemic. Wait times have been hours at the peak of the crisis. Chatbots and other forms of conversational AI have been deployed to help. But they're not quite there yet.

Tearsheet's Sara Toth Stub recently wrote a story about where chatbots are useful and where they aren't. After a lot of hype, they are providing some real value but it will be years before the technology approaches human customer service reps.

Sara Toth Stub is my guest today for a deep dive podcast to discuss the innovations happing in the physical world of payments.