'Pretending that 'it's all just people' is actually the most insane thing to do in that circumstance...' - what I mean by this is that trying to engage with somebody when acting in their institutional capacity as if it was an equal human-human relationship is a recipe for frustration, confusion and ultimately madness, also leaving you open to abuse and exploitation by the institution via its proxies. The rise of AI exposes it, because the 'human' roles it is replacing are already highly controlled - robotised - by management. When you get through to a call centre to make a complaint, or query HMRC about something on your tax return you're talking to a pre-programmed algorithm regardless of whether or not it breathes, eat & shits, even if it's not technically a full-on chatbot.

Hope that makes some kind of sense!
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