AI in Action: From Social Media Rants to Call Center Readiness

Yesterday, I shared some unexpected ways businesses are using AI. Today, I want to expand on that with a real-world example where AI played a role at multiple stages of solving a problem.

Ever watched a company scramble when their customers start losing it online?

I've been there. And honestly, it's not pretty.

Picture this: a major video game drops, players find bugs (because there are ALWAYS bugs), and suddenly social media explodes with frustrated gamers. Then the company's call center gets slammed.

But what if you could see it coming?

I once built an AI system for a game publisher that did exactly that. It monitored social chatter—tracking hashtags, reading the room, analyzing sentiment. The moment players started getting heated online, we knew the call center's phones were about to ring off the hook.

The result? They could staff up BEFORE the storm hit. No more scrambling. No more customers waiting on hold for an hour while they figured out what went wrong.

But here's the kicker—the AI didn't just predict the chaos. It helped solve it too. By "listening" to what players were actually upset about, it could draft responses for support staff. So when those calls came in, agents were ready with real answers, not generic scripts and their finger on the refund button.

This wasn't some fancy enterprise-only solution either. The same principle works whether you're a solo entrepreneur monitoring your first product launch or a Fortune 500 company managing millions of customers.

The magic happens when you stop thinking of AI as this mystical thing and start seeing it as your early warning system.