How good is artificial intelligence (AI) at persuading humans to perform personally costly actions that carry a moral valence? We study the effectiveness of phone calls made to persuade delinquent consumer borrowers to repay their debt. Both a regression discontinuity design and a randomized experiment reveal that AI is substantially less able than human callers to get borrowers to repay. Substituting human callers for AI six days into delinquency closes much of the collection gap, but one year later, borrowers initially assigned to AI and then switched to humans have repaid 1% less than borrowers who were called by humans from the beginning. Even accounting for wage costs and assuming zero costs for AI, using AI is less profitable (with the caveat that we do not observe non-wage costs of labor). AI’s lesser ability to handle complex situations and extract payment promises that feel binding may contribute to the performance gap.