It’s fairly common in the age of artificial intelligence and agents for AI to handle routine customer service faster and cheaper than a call center, but the customer on the other end can get stuck in a loop of menus and canned answers with no way to reach a person.
Starting Jan. 1, 2027, a California customer who asks a large company for a human must get one, or at least a real attempt at one. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1609, the Right to Human Customer Service Act, on Sept. 28. The law requires companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue to connect a customer with a person within 15 minutes of the request, or to book a specific call-back time within one business day.
Chatbots can still answer first. They cannot pretend to be people, and they cannot be the only option.
The law also requires a clear talk-to-a-person option on every service channel during business hours and a disclosure when a chatbot could pass for a human. Hold times are capped at 15 minutes per hold and one hour in total.
A company that makes a reasonable effort to hit the 15 minutes complies even when it misses. Only public prosecutors can enforce the law, with fines of up to $5,000 for a first violation and $10,000 for each one after. Companies that had no phone line as of Jan. 1, 2026, don’t have to add one, and hospitals and credit bureaus are exempt.
The California Chamber of Commerce opposed the bill, arguing that a fixed clock would push agents to end calls faster to reach the next person in the queue, and that handling account issues by phone raises security risks.
Salesforce, Zendesk and Genesys Are Adding the Human Handoff
Large service platforms are building the handoff that California now expects into their AI products. Salesforce said in a March 2025 blog post that Agentforce can be set to offer a human after a fixed period without resolution and to step aside when a customer asks, with the human opening the same console the AI used.
We’d love to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!
Salesforce agreed in June to buy Fin, formerly Intercom, for $3.6 billion and fold its packaged AI service agent into Agentforce, PYMNTS reported June 15.
Zendesk introduced its Autonomous Service Workforce at its annual Relate conference in May. It’s built on a platform trained on about 20 billion ticket interactions. Since May 18, Zendesk counts conversations an AI started and a human finished as separate and charges them accordingly.
Genesys expanded its ServiceNow partnership in September 2025 so a Genesys virtual agent can verify a caller, hand work to a ServiceNow agent and pass the full history to a person when needed. On Sept. 2, Genesys announced Navigator, which routes each request to an AI agent, an automated workflow or an employee.
New York City Follows California With Its Own Chatbot Rule
California was the first state to put a clock on the handoff, and New York City followed with a proposal to end what it called AI customer service “doom loops,” according to an Oct. 20 press release from the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The rule would treat an automated system with no way out as a deceptive practice. The rule requires a disclosure at the start of every automated interaction and a single-step route to a person, such as pressing 0 or saying “agent,” with an estimated wait time, according to a public hearing notice. Penalties start at $525 per violation and reach $3,500 by the third.
New York sets no time limit, but it asks for proof. Merchants would have to keep three years of logs showing whether each automated interaction offered a transfer, whether the customer used it, and whether the customer was then transferred, placed in a queue or given another way to reach a person, the public hearing notice said.
The rule would not reach companies under exclusive federal jurisdiction, such as airlines and national banks, Bloomberg Law reported Oct. 20.
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI newsletter.
Add as Preferred Source
