LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyShe introduced herself as Eve, but Ben knew right away that the voice on the other end of the line was a bot. Eve knew his name. She also knew how much money he’d owed a former landlord ($266). She didn’t seem to know that he’d settled with a collection agency five months prior. Eve said she was an AI agent from ProCollect and was calling to collect a debt. “Would you like to resolve it today by card or bank transfer?” she asked.
Ben had stepped outside on a balmy April afternoon in Portland, Oregon, to take the phone call. (He asked that WIRED use a pseudonym so he could speak freely about a financial issue.) As he stood in the sun, he wondered what he’d have to say to make Eve hand off a call to a human. “I figured it was just going to kick me over to a person when I asked about repayment structure or anything more technical,” he says. But Eve stayed on the line, so Ben did, too. He decided—why not?—to mess with the bot a little.
Ben says he asked the bot to engage in some role-play, in which he was “just a little guy” and his debt was like a giantess prone to trampling him. He wanted to see how weird Eve would get. The bot haltingly played along for a few minutes, he says, but then abruptly punted him to a call center employee. The human agent didn’t disclose whether they’d heard Ben’s bizarre conversation with the AI. They did, however, quickly clear up the confusion: “They looked me up in the system,” he recalls. “Found that the balance was zero.”
Ben’s experience is increasingly common. As inflation and stagnant salaries squeeze pocketbooks, debt delinquency in the United States is swelling. “We have, right now, the highest amount of collections in the courts that I've ever seen,” says debt settlement expert Michael Bovee.
As an unprecedented number of people struggle to repay debtors, the companies chasing down debts are turning to technology to amp up their efforts. Many of the calls, emails, texts, and letters people receive asking for money are now carried out by AI agents. Their tone may be deferential, even sycophantic, but they never fly off the handle. They also never sleep. Their edge comes from persistence and scale. An analysis by the collections agency Kaplan Group estimates that AI debt collectors will be an industry worth nearly $16 billion within the next decade.
AI boosters often stress that, as automation becomes more sophisticated, humanity has a rare chance to get rid of the worst gigs in the world. Working at a call center already sucks. Working at a call center specifically to hound people for money compounds the misery. Career matching platform CareerExplorer ranks debt collection in the bottom 1 percent of professions for job satisfaction. As much as debt collectors hate their jobs, people also hate debt collectors. When the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau first began accepting complaints about debt collection, it received 11,000 within six months, putting it just behind the mortgage industry as the financial service that provoked the most ire.
If there’s any employment sector that could go poof without too much fuss over job loss, it might just be this one. For a bot like Eve, what does it take to beat the least-liked people on Earth?
To get a better handle on Eve’s capabilities, I decided to call her myself.
But when I tried the number Ben gave me, a human ProCollect employee answered. I identified myself as a journalist. They told me that no one was around to answer my questions and suggested I call back the next day. When I did, another human told me that the company does not use AI but also that I should talk to human resources. HR told me to email my questions, which I did. One of my queries: Where did Eve come from?
While I awaited a reply from the collection agency, Ben graciously volunteered to try calling Eve back himself. He got through and prodded the bot to reveal who created it and how it was trained. Eve demurred on the first question and spat out a generic answer to the second: “I use a mix of conversation patterns and account-related training to help.” Ben said he still had questions. Eve asked if he wanted to speak to a human. Ben said he did. Eve said the office was closed.
Because debt collection is such a no-duh industry to automate, any number of companies could have been involved in creating Eve. Pedro Fernández, cofounder of the startup Altur, which operates a “human-less call center,” says collections agencies were among the industry’s “best early adopters.” Altur’s agents complete more than 2.5 million calls a month about debt issues, Fernández says, and the company’s clients include major banks in Mexico.
Altur is one of half a dozen debt collection and settlement startups to have incubated at Y Combinator in the past six years alone. Some already operate on an even larger scale, like Domu, which was founded in 2023 and “automates debt-collection calls, texts, and emails” for clients in health care and financial services. Domu describes itself as a company “doing what nobody else is willing to do.” According to Isaac Choate, Domu’s head of product and growth, the company’s AI agents hit 70 million monthly connected calls in March.
These companies go to great lengths to make their agents as deft as possible. Choate says Domu’s agents adjust how they speak based on who they’re calling, even varying their Spanish accent based on whether they’re calling someone in Mexico versus Colombia. “Situational tone” is crucial, he says. “An agent that's handling a hardship conversation is going to sound a lot different from one handling a routine reminder, which is more of a friendly, neighborly sort of conversation.”
Companies have different thresholds for when they shift calls over to humans. Mentioning bankruptcy, or raising anything categorized as a “vulnerability signal” (illness, a death in the family), will trigger Altur’s agents to transfer the call to a human, while other companies will allow their AI agents to continue talking. A chipper young salesman from another AI debt collection startup, Moveo, showed me how agents review information on each person they call. Moveo’s agents adjust how they speak based on whether someone brings up a medical condition, job loss, or lawyers; they even create “psychographic profiles” for the humans they call by analyzing transcripts of prior conversations.
Debt collectors are notorious for badgering their targets, but they do have rules to follow; laws like the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act in the United States are meant to shield people from manipulative tactics, like threatening to tell someone’s spouse about the money they owe or calling repeatedly in the middle of the night. All of the AI startups I spoke with stressed that their systems have been designed to comply with existing laws. Some industry insiders wonder if that’s enough. Credit counselor Martin Lynch worries that a buggy agent could inadvertently disclose a debt to the wrong person—which would break the law—and calls the industry “a minefield of legal trouble.”
Despite the risks, evangelists for AI collectors see them as a kinder, gentler alternative to an old-fashioned, crabby, low-paid human chasing down payments. They stress that bots can get a surprisingly positive reception. In some cases, they say, the issue isn’t that people don’t want to speak to the AI agents—it’s that they don’t want to stop. “We've had cases of people asking the agent for a personal number to keep talking and a few where the person pretty clearly developed some interest in the voice on the other end,” says Altur’s Fernández. “Not something we expected to see.”
A lot of AI debt collection agents sound like women. As in the wider AI industry, consumers are coaxed to forget that the agent they’re talking to is not a sentient being with thoughts, feelings, and a gender identity. Domu calls one of its agents Taylor and gave its avatar auburn hair and a pert, welcoming expression. Another company, Floatbot, has AI debt collectors named Emily and Lexi. “Female voices get more traction,” Jimmy Padia, the company’s founder and CEO, tells me. It’s all part of the larger strategy to create a debt collector so copacetic you can’t help but agree to give it money. Padia says Floatbot’s tools have helped one client, a health care collections agency, reduce its human head count from 45 to 19.
Of all these female agents, which one was our Eve? One truly obvious candidate I found was a startup called Eve Calls, whose bots collect debts. (They also served on the front lines of the information war in Ukraine: In 2022, the company partnered with the Ukrainian government to “refute destructive statements of Russian military propaganda” with robocalls.) But when I contacted its CEO, Oleksii Skrypka, he said he could not confirm or deny whether its agent was calling Ben. “We're bound by NDAs,” Skrypka told me over email. “I'd also note that ‘Eve’ is a fairly common name choice for voice agents across the industry—the name alone isn't a unique identifier of our platform.”
In fact, “Eve” didn’t even seem to be a unique identifier for Eve. When Ben called the bot back so I could hear its voice, it glitched and introduced itself by Ben’s name.
There’s obviously enthusiasm for this technology within the industry—and startups loudly tout the supposed efficiency boost—but it’s not clear how effective AI debt collectors actually are. James Choi, a professor at the Yale School of Management who has studied AI debt collection, believes that some people may not be as responsive to bot collectors because they don’t feel the same sense of shame or obligation talking to AI as they would a person. “If I'm making a promise to pay a debt to an AI, it just doesn't feel as binding as if I'm making that promise to a real-life human being,” he says.
That lack of shame, though, helps some startups explain why AI debt collectors should exist in the first place. Confessing to financial mistakes can be torturous. Floatbot’s Padia says customers are “less embarrassed talking to an AI agent” than a human collector. Easy for the founder of an AI debt collection startup to say, of course. But it does track with research indicating that people prefer to talk about other embarrassing topics with chatbots rather than humans.
Susan Shin, the legal director of the advocacy group New Economy Project, worries that AI collectors will make what is perceived as a scuzzy industry even scuzzier. “People already feel really pressured to respond to debt collection letters and debt collection phone calls. With AI, it is really easy for them to scale that up,” she says. The collections industry is no longer limited by how many calls any given collector can make in an eight-hour shift; now, one “agent” can make thousands of calls simultaneously. Even the friendliest, most courteous bot is still after the same thing—and it’s indefatigable. The New Economy Project is pushing for legislation that would make companies liable for how their AI collectors behave.
Some people in debt are also turning to AI tools to help navigate conversations with creditors. Mary (also a pseudonym) owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to various creditors, mostly due to a rough patch running her couples therapy business, she says. She hired a debt settlement coach, as well as a lawyer. But she also uses ChatGPT. “I’ll ask it to help me with a script, so that I have something in front of me so that I don't get flustered,” she says. It’s not perfect, and she thinks her coach gives the best advice, but she finds that the AI is often more effective than the lawyer. Some fintech companies offer “AI debt advisers” and voice agents that will negotiate with creditors on behalf of indebted people. At this rate, we’re hurtling toward a world where someone like Ben doesn’t answer when Eve calls—another version of Eve does.
ProCollect never got back to me, so Ben took a few more stabs at getting Eve to talk. We decided to test whether it would be more willing to spill to another AI instead of a human. So we put ChatGPT on the line in voice mode. As before, Eve glitched under questioning. “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble understanding,” Eve said. “Would you like me to transfer you to a live agent?” Our chatbot said yes. We waited. Eve hung up.
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