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That deck collector calling, it could be an AI bot.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

If you have a debt, you may get a call, a letter, a text, all of the above, prodding you to pay that debt back.

Now that call could come from an AI agent. According to the Kapling Group, the AI debt collection

market is expected to reach $16 billion by 2034. Kate Nibs of Wired has been reporting on this.

I asked her how effective these bots are and getting people to pay back the money they owe.

The little research that has been done on this industry does not imply that human debt collectors will be out of a job anytime soon.

Right now, the research actually suggests that these AI agents might be less efficient at convincing people to settle debts than humans.

Now, that begs the question, why would companies then use less effective AI agents instead of humans?

And like, the answer to that is, even if they're slightly less

effective than a human, they're exponentially cheaper because an agent can place, you know,

hundreds of calls simultaneously. Like they aren't bounded by things like needing to eat or

sleep. And so the fact that they are so cheap and can scale how many calls

...