They fired the humans
and left this.
In February 2025, TELUS offered voluntary severance to around 700 employees. In January 2026 they did it again — nearly 700 more, over 500 of them United Steelworkers Local 1944 members. A company spokesperson attributed it to "rapid change in the industry and growing customer demand for self-serve solutions."
Customers were, at that exact moment, demonstrating their appetite for self-serve solutions by filing complaints against TELUS at a rate up 63% year over year — enough to make it, for the first time since the complaints commission was founded in 2007, the most complained-about telecom provider in Canada.
MobileSyrup — the buyouts ↗ Global News — the complaint figures ↗ Full sourced timeline →
Anyway. Here's the self-serve solution. Do have a chat with it.
A degrading corporate slogan
The Future Is Friendly
* Friendliness is a promotional rate and expires after 12 months. Friendliness is subject to an annual adjustment. Friendliness is not available in all areas. Friendliness does not include speaking to a human being, and any expectation of same is not covered under this or any agreement. Your friendliness has been automated in order to serve you better. Early termination of friendliness may incur a fee, except where prohibited by Telecom Regulatory Policy 2026-43, which prohibits it. This conversation may be recorded for quality assurance purposes; the quality will not be assured. Friendliness, once cancelled, cannot be reinstated in chat — please call during business hours, which are currently ending.
The above is a parody of corporate marketing language. It is an altered phrase used for the purpose of criticism and comment, is not a trade-mark of this site, and is not used to identify any goods or services.
An AI-powered virtual assistant is standing by to not help you.
Fictional, as noted above. The pattern it caricatures — deflection loops, upsells in place of answers, a queue that grows while you wait — is drawn from widely reported customer experience across the industry, not from any TELUS system.
Help TELUS afford a better AI
A charitable appeal on behalf of one of Canada's largest telecommunications companies, which cannot currently afford an artificial intelligence that understands the word "cancel."
A Better AI for TELUS
Organised by: everyone who has ever typed "representative" four times.
$20 is the monthly cost of a competent commercial AI assistant. We have been unable to raise it. They have been unable to spend it.
Stretch goals
- $5The AI learns what the word "cancel" means.
- $12The AI stops recommending the article you just told it did not help.
- $20The AI can distinguish between "I want to speak to a human" and "I want to add a line."
- $50A human.
- $400A human who is allowed to issue a credit without asking someone else.
- $8BThe AI achieves the emotional range of a hold tone.
We can't take your money.
This fundraiser is a joke and does not accept payments. There is no payment form, no processor, and no account behind it — deliberately, because a parody charity that took real money would be a crime, and we'd like to keep the moral high ground we're currently standing on.
That's the entire difference between this website and the thing it's about: when we say a charge doesn't exist, the charge doesn't exist.
If you want to do something with actual financial consequences, go and read the escape guide. That one moves real money — back to you.
The serious version of this joke
Automating support isn't inherently wrong. Plenty of things are genuinely better self-serve, and nobody misses waiting on hold to change a mailing address.
The problem is what gets automated and what doesn't. Notice that the chatbot above is instantly capable the moment you mention cancelling, and mysteriously incapable the moment you mention a refund. That asymmetry is not a technical limitation. Sales flows get engineering attention because they're measured in revenue. Retention friction is a feature with a business case. The support path is where the cost-cutting lands, because a customer who gives up costs nothing — that's the saving.
Which is how you end up cutting roughly 1,400 support roles citing customer demand for self-serve, while the complaint rate rises 63% and then 78%, and describe both as a success, because they are being measured against different targets by different departments.
If a chatbot has looped you three times, stop. You are not failing to explain yourself — you are talking to something built to absorb the attempt. Go straight to a written escalation, and if that fails, to the CCTS. The ladder is here.