He was following up on an order from The Home Depot. After speaking to too many AI agents, he no longer knows if the staff is human: ‘I’m Latin’

Jason Chao (@jasonthechao) wanted to follow up on an order he placed at The Home Depot. But after being transferred to too many AI agents, he was left wondering whether any human staff was still available to speak with.

“We live in a world where the workers are real, but the managers are digital,” Chao wrote in the caption of his viral TikTok video, which has gained nearly a million views on social media.

“I’m having a bizarre, surreal, 2026 AI moment here at The Home Depot,” Chao said. He explained that he ordered a vanity for his new bathroom, which they had to redo because of a leak. He chose to buy from The Home Depot because he assumed it would arrive on time.

“It was supposed to arrive on a Monday. That Monday, it did not arrive,” Chao claimed. Because he urgently needed the vanity, he called Home Depot and said the automated voice message sent him “to silence.” He said that even though he pressed the right buttons to be redirected, he still hit a dead end.

His vanity got lost

“And then, I went to Home Depot, the real store, to get a person from the customer service to call. They called, and they said it would arrive by Friday. So, I waited until that Friday,” Chao said. Despite waiting for his package like this woman from Florida, who alleged she was scammed out of $75, his vanity still didn’t arrive.

Chao said he called again on Monday, and the same customer service employees answered. Again, they said the vanity would arrive the following Friday. Again, it didn’t come. Chao called the customer service hotline for a third time.

“Please tell them that I’m very upset. I will go and pick it up,” Chao said. He assumed the logistics problem might be because the delivery drivers weren’t being paid enough. He explained, “At some point, you can’t pay somebody enough to bring it over because gas costs too, right? There’s just too many people taking a cut.”

He asked the Home Depot staff to talk to the agent, since he wanted to find a way to bring his vanity home. “And when I talked to the agent, and I swear to God, the agent is AI. Because they are way too patient, they are way too accommodating, their accent is bizarre,” Chao alleged.

Chao said that he even began questioning the AI agent’s existence out loud to the other people at The Home Depot. Despite casting doubt on the agent’s human status, Chao claimed that it patiently waited for him to finish his response and was polite afterward.

He didn’t think he’d have an AI issue at The Home Depot

“I asked it where it was from, and it said it was from Atlanta. And I asked it about the Braves, and it knew nothing,” Chao alleged. The Atlanta Braves are a professional baseball team based in Atlanta, Georgia, that competes in Major League Baseball. It’s a team based in the agent’s supposed home city, yet Chao claimed it knew nothing about them.

“I asked it where their accent was from. They claimed to be from a Latin country. ‘I’m Latin,’ right? Like, not a specific,” Chao continued. He expected them to name a specific country, like Brazil, Mexico, or Guatemala. Their lack of a specific answer made Chao even more suspicious of the agent. Then, he decided to joke, saying the agent’s accent sounded like it was from Milwaukee, and the agent allegedly laughed in what seemed to be a robotic tone.

“And then, the best I could do was to get it to send me the contact information for the third-party provider that apparently has it in San Bernardino, which is very, very far away from where I live,” Chao claimed. When he tried to call the number, he alleged that another AI agent answered.

“I looked up the company, and it’s owned and operated by Walmart. I don’t know if my vanity ever even existed, or if any of these human beings are even real,” Chao joked. Cutting his losses, he decided to buy another vanity in store. But retail stores aren’t the only ones using AI for customer service. One man from Atlanta alleged that he was transferred to an AI chatbot after dialing emergency services.

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