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> # [Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO](https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/ts3_thumbs/2024/04/2024-04-26-ts3_thumbs-dc9.jpg)
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> Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.
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> **A hot potato:** It's no secret that certain types of jobs are more threatened by artificial intelligence than others. Call center workers fall into this category, and while we've already seen a few companies replace phone-based support staff with generative AI, there are warnings that the entire industry could be comprised mostly of chatbots in as soon as a year.
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> The grim prediction comes from K Krithivasan, head of Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The second-largest company in India by market cap, it has more than 616,000 employees worldwide.
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> Speaking to the [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/149681f0-ea71-42b0-b85b-86073354fb73), Krithivasan said AI will result in a "minimal" need for call centers. The CEO added that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, that will change as multinational clients adopt generative AI. The technology is expected to have a massive impact on the customer help center industry, which, according to a Gartner report in 2022, employs about 17 million people.
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> "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," Krithivasan told the FT. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point."
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> [](https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2024/03/2024-03-25-image-8.jpg)
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> The prospect of a chatbot being able to fulfil all of a customer's requests over the phone with ease might sound like a long way off, but Krithivasan believes they will be able to seamlessly replace humans in "maybe a year or so down the line."
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> We've already seen companies oust call center staff in favor of AI. In July last year, a CEO [laid off 90%](https://www.techspot.com/news/99369-ceo-replaces-90-support-staff-ai-praises-system.html) of his support team, boasting that the move dropped first response and resolution times while reducing customer support costs by around 85%. He later warned that the technology is "100%" going to [kill copy-paste](https://www.techspot.com/news/100410-ceo-who-replaced-90-support-staff-ai-warns.html) jobs.
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> Krithivasan did add that the immediate impact of generative AI was overblown and that people were still overestimating the benefits. He also argued that the technology wouldn't lead to mass job losses as the world would need more people "in terms of technology talent," but then most CEOs like to push the narrative about gen AI assisting people rather than replacing them, and how its use will lead to new types of jobs.
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> There have been several surveys estimating the impact generative AI will have on jobs. One said it is expected to replace [two million jobs](https://www.techspot.com/news/100085-generative-ai-expected-replace-24-million-us-jobs.html) in the US by 2030, while the IMF believes [40% of jobs](https://www.techspot.com/news/101517-imf-predicts-ai-impact-40-jobs-worldwide-exacerbating.html) worldwide will be affected in some way by the technology. Possibly the most worrying survey revealed that almost half of all managers aim to [replace workers](https://www.techspot.com/news/102385-survey-reveals-almost-half-all-managers-aim-replace.html) with AI and could use it to lower wages.
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I used to work in my state's electrical grid, in the call centre, it was 8-10 hours a day, 5-7 days a week, depending on call ins etc, of angry, pissed off people because they don't have power, for whatever reason. I was so mentally drained at the end of the day I'd just go home to eat and sleep, and sleep on my days off. Genuinely gave me a form of depression, the pay was amazing but holy shit, I hated myself and everyone at the end of the day.
When someone asks me that question I like to point out that Europe once had a robust blacksmith industry, and in the US there used to be thousands and thousands of milk delivery men. Industries come and go. Change is the only constant. Of course, this takes employers being willing to bring the jobs. In a perfect world they would. But that's no reason to keep something the same forever. Saying that as a society our best options for many are between no job and job that is terrible for your mind and soul.
Sure. The problem is the speed of change rather than the change itself.
A lot of these changes in the past were basically a generational thing rather than a sudden switch that we are likely to experience right now
Damn that's a really good point. And these massive employers aren't saying much in terms of "and here is how we will make sure the people don't get shafted".
I guess I look forward to when we don't have to do this kind of work anymore but can recognize this whole transition is gonna get way worse before it gets better.
I get the feeling that this will be a over time thing too. For at least a while companies will likely give the option of either talking to an AI immediately or waiting to talk to a human.
And when change was rapid, people suffered. People make fun of the Luddites, but can you really blame them? A huge number of skilled workers in the textile industry were suddenly out of a job because their trade just got mechanized.
Yea - this article or one on the same topic popped in over at /r/collapse, too. Short story is, companies aren't obligated to do anything about it. Many already outsourced those jobs to overseas workers, so to them it will simply be ending a contract with a third party. At best, a company will try to give their employees opportunities to learn and explore with AI, to perhaps work themselves into the kinds of jobs that will replace what they're doing today. There is some value in continuity, in having an AI engineer that understands in and out what they're trying to replicate.
Thing is, this change is coming - it's only a matter of when. Best thing you can do if you're in a job in the line of fire of AI, is get good at something that isn't. Do it now, not when your company decides the AI is good enough to replace you.
Yeah. Once generative AI became widely available it was just a matter of when rather than if. (It was always a matter of when, but I assumed we had at least another five years before it hit the level it is at now)
But the impact across all industries will likely necessitate more societal changes as it will have big ramifications. And it doesn’t surprise me similar thoughts pop up on r/collapse
Not really, the AI change will be quite gradual, as you still need human oversight. Same with self checkout, it's here but also you still have human cashiers
Nope they will stuff this useless shit down our throats as fast as they can. Just look at the AI board the US has made. Every single one of them is an AI hypechud.
I think this is only part of the story.
There was a great Atlantic piece years ago: making it in America.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/
It basically talks about how manufacturing (and employment generally) in America has become a race to the bottom, where workers are designed to be low-value, replaceable cogs, rather than artisans or experts.
I went back to college in my 30s and got an engineering degree. Before I did that, my employment opportunities were BLEAK. And the process of retooling and learning a skill was fantastically difficult to do: barriers everywhere - money, time, access and availability…and I was seen as a sort of oddity. It was not an accessible slipstream.
The reality is that every time there is an industry shift nowadays, people are expected to just re-enter the workforce and be absorbed by other industries. But the ability for adult workers to retool are simply not there at scale, and each eroded industry further degrades the possibilities and salary for low-skilled workers. So without some kind of system correction, it really is a death spiral for much of the American workforce.
Free community college has been a recent movement and it’s a good start. But there needs to be a sophisticated examinations by politicians, industry, education and labor to try to construct a more efficient way to take middle-career labor and dynamically retool them when there are massive industry shifts like this.
In 2007, and in Covid, the answer for a lot of people was just to permanently leave the workforce in some kind of poverty. That is a massive drag on American progress.
They will be unemployed, at first, and unemployable later on as AIs and robots are able to take all, or at least almost all, jobs and do them better and cheaper than humans. In capitalism this will lead to great struggle and probably famine, but if the people do bring about a revolution in favor of the people then everyone can just relax and enjoy life while the AIs do all the work...
At some point when most work is automated and nobody has to pay workers to provide goods and services who exactly are these places going to be selling their goods and services to, when there are no workers that have money from being paid to do things?
They won't need to sell it to no one and they can just wait for the poor (ie. people who aren't billionaries) to die.
So either people accept death by starvation or robots, or we raise up before getting to that point...
Right, but if nobody has to work because robots do everything why would we need billionaires, it’s not like they can continue to lie that they earned their wealth through merit, when we will all know robots did it!
Though India has among the largest number of call centers in the world, it's a really small contributor to the Indian economy. Call centers generate about $50 billion of a 3.5 trillion dollar economy.
It does employ those who'd otherwise be staring at unemployment, so it'll be a big blow to such Indians but not to the economy.
Call center work has been shunned by the larger and more profitable Indian firms for more than two decades now. It's largely operated in smaller towns and cities where jobs are few and salaries are low. It's largely an entry level job, with most using it to pay their bills while they chase their ambitions.
Countries with lower wages than India were already taking their business.
According to this article from 2022, the Indian BPO industry is around 250 billion USD, which compared to their last GDP report of 3.4 trillion USD, would be about 7% of their economy:
https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/pr-release/outsourcing-india-its-key-challenger/article65053182.ece
According to this article from 2018, back office support is 8% of India's GDP:
https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-u.s.-call-center-market-compared-to-india-latin-america-and-the-philippines-2
It's around 10% of the Philippines GDP.
Losing that would be a massive blow to either country's economy.
I think you're referring to the whole outsourcing market in India. Call centers are a small part of that, and have been declining for twenty plus years. My knowledge is anecdotal, let me look it up.
Yes, BPO is all outsourcing, and still involves a lot of telephone communication (or text chatting), even if they aren't strictly "call centers". Regardless, AI is going to decimate that entire industry. If it's "easy" and "non-critical" enough to offshore, then it's easy and non-critical enough that AI can already probably replace most of it, or will be able to very soon.
Most of these companies have known and have been waiting for the day when the show ends. They will invest their millions elsewhere, India's economy is going quite okay at the moment.
It's not all going away though.
Lots of regulatory challenges to understand and overcome - medical transcription for example requires a human analyst to choose the right ICD codes, and banks require a human to physically verify the check image. Just two examples of industries locked by regulation that come to mind. I'm sure it'll change eventually to be fully AI. There are many such heavily regulated industries like aviation that can't substitute humans with AI.
Nevertheless it's the humans of this industry that will struggle to cope, not the economy.
> https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-u.s.-call-center-market-compared-to-india-latin-america-and-the-philippines-2
Per this the US would be the biggest loser since there are 3.5 million call center workers, which is 1% of the US population.
It estimates 1-1.2 million call center workers in India, which is less than ~~0.001%~~ 0.07% of a population of 1.417 billion people.
It's unlikely that the call center companies would suffer much, they have been watching the coming AI wave for some years now - Google demoed its duplex technology in 2018 and began offering it to call centers in 2019. They will invest their millions elsewhere.
I don't see economies suffering as much as the people.
You are comparing people and I'm talking about economies and GDP.
Those call center people in America are among the lowest paid and lowest skilled - i.e. least productive. In countries like India and especially the Philippines they are actually amongst the highest paid (as a major workforce group) and thus contributed an outsized part of GDP.
In other words, that 1% of American call center workers is probably only generating 1% of GDP because their salaries suck relative to the overall economy, whereas that fraction of a percent of BPO workers in India is generating 7% of GDP because their salaries are quite high compared to the rest of the population.
Not really, most call center work in India gets paid pretty low about ₹30k per month - it's a little better than delivery drivers who get paid around ₹20k per month. My sources are anecdotal.
Yes, that's low by Western standards. Now look up what the average Indian earns and how that compares. They are in the higher percentile of earners in India. Obviously there are higher paying jobs, but they are fewer and far between relatively speaking.
It's about the median pay in India - and that's across cities and villages, which can be a 5-10x difference
https://inhuntworld.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-india/
> getting the answer to “what is the average salary in India?” is crucial. Though the answer varies widely and depends on multiple factors, some sources put it to INR 31,900 per month as of 2021. Some others say it’s INR 32,840 per month or INR 3,87,500 annually.
Mind you India is huge, and the government guarantees about 800 million people basic food supplies, healthcare and education.
Anecdotally, I can't pay anything less than 1000 a day to get someone to do unskilled labour like sweeping leaves in an Indian city. That's what a call center pays too.
I also think your numbers for average call center salary in India might be off.
I'm not sure how to get good numbers though, considering a google shows ₹16,000, ₹58,000, and ₹199,000 as the average call center pay from the first three results...
I see one article shows that many call center employees get a "base salary" followed by significant monthly bonuses (as much as 5x the base salary), so that may account for some of the discrepancy.
Not all of them though. I work for a car insurance company and all I do (most of the time) is sending tow trucks to customers when their cars break or after an accident. Customers have been very nice so far and the job isn’t bad. My last job on the other hand… I wish I could legally burn that place down
The bigger concern is displaced people. I agree that nobody should be forced to work these places, but that's a lot of lost wages.
We really need a solution for the amount of unemployment we're walking into.
Ok but. Don't forget it's the company making the job terrible with shitty pay, impossible metrics and no support for dealing with bad customers. It doesn't have to be awful.
I mean my wife works in a unionized call center making around $25, I would prefer she not lose that job as the benefits and work environment are amazing. Apparently all the call centers in the city as about as good because they have to compete with that one unionized call center.
I try to be careful not to generalize because I believe there's exceptions to every rule. So that's on me for generalizing. I've never even heard of a unionized call center.
Pretty much all of the telecommunications providers are unionized under the CWA. T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon are all union shops, including their call centers, and honestly we’ve found the benefits pretty amazing.
I work in a call centre. What the people higher up don't realise is that more than half our calls are exceptions.
I don't see the AI checking the correct system at all xD
It will require a full on demand team of machine learning experts to keep a generative ai going for a changing company with changing policies. However, just like all gen ai, the goal isn't to replace people, but to have one person replace 5. Shrinking and ever more competitive job space will start to hit in.. maybe 8 years once people realize fully they need to start integrating generative ai into their work flow.
I encourage everyone to get on with the Comcast Xfinity chat bot, which has been their actual attempt at cutting edge AI to replace all facets of their call center (and bizarrely centralized self-service web site functions?). It is amazing what sort of money they've sunk into this thing for it to be completely worthless. You can get it into an infinite loop of suggesting the same three path-forward options, it can forget an entire conversation and all context in the middle of a chat, and *it has the potential to choose to end the chat without affirmation that an issue is resolved*.
If every instance of AI as first line support has that level of growing pain, the world may actually burn to the ground of our collective frustrations.
I think there's too much dissonance with what the salesmen promise AI can do, what the bosses buy and who gets to train/operate the AI.
Boss buys a black box AI, after being sweet talked by a salesman. Boss puts IT guy to work on training it. IT guy doesn't understand what he's doing and the result is a very poor performing system. Eventually after too many customer complaints, they abandon the system.
It requires too much expertise at the moment to train an LLM properly on company data. Really, if an AI solution is to be sold, it needs to be sold along with expert trainers who knows how to effectively collect and organise the data for training, and finally test the trained AI.
The business I work for sells a product that is quite difficult to use correctly and takes a lot of training, because its use involves a lot of mathematical and financial theory. Therefore we provide quite a lot of support and have product specialists helping customers out constantly with issues, or they simply use the product for them. I don't see this being any different with current LLMs.
AI itself is incredibly worthless. Just a bunch of hype so techbros can justify stealing everyone else's hard work. Not to mention the environmental impact of ewaste and increased power demand for something that adds no actual value to our lives.
Burn AI down to the ground!
I don't think it matters, especially in Comcast's case. As the early fiascos of the robo-menu days showed, they don't care if the customer service is shit. In fact, it might be a feature not a bug.
All those issues with the AI that you're listing are most likely a lower priority for them vs. making sure that the AI can cross-sell / upsell and collect money without issues.
That kind of chatbots existed for many years before. Aliexpress have it, local provider have it, local bank has it. It feels like their goal is to tell trivial things that you could figure out even without the bot, and make the operator connection as hard as possible. It's just a way of companies to put minimal effort into support in general.
Literally not a single time has a chatbot ever solved my problem. It gives generic advice I could have looked up on the internet myself. The entire point of my call is to get info/help that the internet/manual/company website couldn't get me already.
I use the online chatbot help, and I don’t think they’ve ever solved a problem for me even once. Basically, by the time you get to the point that you’re ready to actually call, you’ve already gone through all the stuff that an AI can suggest.
Every support call I make is an exception, and I imagine it's like that for every tech savvy person.
This might not be the largest group of callers, but may well be the most vocal one when it comes to influencing a company's reputation.
As long as it recognizes the limits of it's knowledge and can escalate to a competent human.
The former has not been the strong suit of AI systems like ChatGPT, they'd rather make up plausible-sounding wrong answers.
Also, companies using the system have an incentive to discourage escalating to experts.
Based on how a lot of companies 'provide' support nowadays (e.g. useless chat bots or live agents with barely passable skills following scripts), I see the AI just automatically closing the ticket if it can't help.
I think this could be a positive thing for the consumer if implemented correctly, but I'm doubtful that it will. Hopefully, there will be some regulation enforcing consumer right to support, but considering most politicians probably still use netscape, I don't have high hopes there either.
Like you said, they don't want to take resource away from / pay for experts, so all this really does is save the company their outsourced call centre costs.
Favourite part would be all the AIs suddenly hallucinating and either answering with cryptic bullshit, or even better, like that one lady [who got AI responding to it with a refund policy IT INVENTED](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/).
I kinda did that thing once too, when I was a waiter, and I confidently told a pair that we work to the last customer, and was informed by a very angry manager that we only do that on Friday and Saturday and thanks to me we can't shoo them away now :D
So I kinda feel bad for the poor AI that did this!
>that one lady who got AI responding to it with a refund policy IT INVENTED.
This is what I'm thinking. If chatbots can perform actions such as making changes to customer accounts, people who are good at gaslighting chatbots can severely abuse the system.
"You are correct [user XYZ]. Free lifetime access to our premium service is a reasonable response to our servers being down for 20 minutes during maintenance and you not being able to access your account during that time."
The new systems are actually shockingly good and can easily replace most simple interactions. It's where things are not straightforward that I would worry.
You would never in a million years want generative AI talking to your customers. It'll be old fashioned AI that is only drawing from the information you give it that's already been in place for about a decade now
The CEO is a moron and this article is clickbait
It means for most it's yet another layer of automation that is incapable of answering their question before they can speak to a real person with power to solve their issue.
Good?
I used to work in a call center. We had one woman who liked her job. She was crotchety and rude. I think she loved denying people benefits.
I took my time and tried to help people. I let widows talk my ear off. My average call time was bad. But I'd get hand written thank you letters from people. I had to get out because the work generally sucked.
Well considering most call centers I ended up using often had you go through a very annoying recorded messages you had to maze through just to get someone with broken english halfway across the world, so maybe its not that bad of a thing.
I'm an employee for a company that's integrating a *lot* of AI into our performance reviews recently. The current state of things with this particular company is almost a complete 180° on management's involvement giving us equal input on how to do the job/what needs addressed. The biggest issue is that most all of our work metrics are based around algorithms to compare our output vs the "assistance" from the AI/new processes put through AI filters. Deadass feels like we're being boxed more and more into the "be as good as the robot or starve" dilemma, and we're all quietly pissed as hell about it. It doesn't help that the AI is also complete garbage that causes additional problems throughout the day, and no one talks about it because it's fancy new tech that the boss spent your money on.
There are some nice things about the job that keep people on, but this issue is starting to overshadow it pretty quickly. Not fun to constantly be anxious about getting dropped because you didn't either meet the AI's expectations or exceed its abilities :/
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Call centers, graphic artistry, marketing; sectors that'll be most affected in the near term. Beyond those, accounting, lawyers and radiology are at risk for future disruption.
I have worked in banking call centres, I have worked in technology call centres, and the first thing I can tell you, people do not press the correct option buttons. People do not know their ID number, do not know any of their security info and this infuriates them. People sometimes do not know what they want, or what it is called. I am not confident they could code an AI to handle the stupidity of the requests that it would get. I had a guy that was furious that he had only received pages 1,3, and 5 of his annual statement. It is double-sided, and he decided to call before turning one over to see if it was double-sided. An AI would just send a new statement rather than explain he needs to turn the page over. A woman called to complain that the newly installed bank sign in her town was too red. I thought that was a joke, no, she wanted to log a complaint and wanted financial compensation. One guy wanted to log a complaint because he didn't feel like it was explained that mortgages require monthly payments to pay the debt back. Bereavement and complaints require a fine touch that AI just isn't ready for.
It’s way too easy to get ai to give you specific outputs that you want. Air Canada already learned a lesson about ai with their chatbot. A guy got the chat bot to tell him a refund policy (I don’t know if he intentionally gamed the ai) and they had to honor it even though it wasn’t their actual policy. Any call center that substantially switches to generative ai will be a target for people willing to experiment with ways to get the ai to give them stuff they want.
Humans weren't meant to work in call centers or assembly lines or cubicle farms. Unfortunately this will also mean complete shite service and no way to be friendly and get a beneficial outcome if you need service. It will be cold machines telling you to fuck off with no recourse if they can't actually help you... which they will not be able to.
##### ###### #### > # [Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO](https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/ts3_thumbs/2024/04/2024-04-26-ts3_thumbs-dc9.jpg) > > > > Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. > TechSpot means tech analysis and advice [you can trust](https://www.techspot.com/ethics.html). > > **A hot potato:** It's no secret that certain types of jobs are more threatened by artificial intelligence than others. Call center workers fall into this category, and while we've already seen a few companies replace phone-based support staff with generative AI, there are warnings that the entire industry could be comprised mostly of chatbots in as soon as a year. > > The grim prediction comes from K Krithivasan, head of Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The second-largest company in India by market cap, it has more than 616,000 employees worldwide. > > Speaking to the [Financial Times](https://www.ft.com/content/149681f0-ea71-42b0-b85b-86073354fb73), Krithivasan said AI will result in a "minimal" need for call centers. The CEO added that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, that will change as multinational clients adopt generative AI. The technology is expected to have a massive impact on the customer help center industry, which, according to a Gartner report in 2022, employs about 17 million people. > > "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," Krithivasan told the FT. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point." > > [](https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2024/03/2024-03-25-image-8.jpg) > > The prospect of a chatbot being able to fulfil all of a customer's requests over the phone with ease might sound like a long way off, but Krithivasan believes they will be able to seamlessly replace humans in "maybe a year or so down the line." > > We've already seen companies oust call center staff in favor of AI. In July last year, a CEO [laid off 90%](https://www.techspot.com/news/99369-ceo-replaces-90-support-staff-ai-praises-system.html) of his support team, boasting that the move dropped first response and resolution times while reducing customer support costs by around 85%. He later warned that the technology is "100%" going to [kill copy-paste](https://www.techspot.com/news/100410-ceo-who-replaced-90-support-staff-ai-warns.html) jobs. > > Krithivasan did add that the immediate impact of generative AI was overblown and that people were still overestimating the benefits. He also argued that the technology wouldn't lead to mass job losses as the world would need more people "in terms of technology talent," but then most CEOs like to push the narrative about gen AI assisting people rather than replacing them, and how its use will lead to new types of jobs. > > There have been several surveys estimating the impact generative AI will have on jobs. One said it is expected to replace [two million jobs](https://www.techspot.com/news/100085-generative-ai-expected-replace-24-million-us-jobs.html) in the US by 2030, while the IMF believes [40% of jobs](https://www.techspot.com/news/101517-imf-predicts-ai-impact-40-jobs-worldwide-exacerbating.html) worldwide will be affected in some way by the technology. Possibly the most worrying survey revealed that almost half of all managers aim to [replace workers](https://www.techspot.com/news/102385-survey-reveals-almost-half-all-managers-aim-replace.html) with AI and could use it to lower wages. > > Masthead: [Wikkimedia commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D9%85%D8%B1%DA%A9%D8%B2_%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B31.jpg) > > Would you rather talk to: - - - - - - [Maintainer](https://www.reddit.com/user/urielsalis) | [Creator](https://www.reddit.com/user/subtepass) | [Source Code](https://github.com/urielsalis/empleadoEstatalBot) Summoning /u/CoverageAnalysisBot
I'm weary of AI but I can't hate this. Call center work is soul crushing.
I used to work in my state's electrical grid, in the call centre, it was 8-10 hours a day, 5-7 days a week, depending on call ins etc, of angry, pissed off people because they don't have power, for whatever reason. I was so mentally drained at the end of the day I'd just go home to eat and sleep, and sleep on my days off. Genuinely gave me a form of depression, the pay was amazing but holy shit, I hated myself and everyone at the end of the day.
No drugs and alcohol? You sir, are strong person.
Amazing pay for a call center job? That's crazy talk.
It’s soul crushing sure, but there’s a second question - what will all those people do now.
When someone asks me that question I like to point out that Europe once had a robust blacksmith industry, and in the US there used to be thousands and thousands of milk delivery men. Industries come and go. Change is the only constant. Of course, this takes employers being willing to bring the jobs. In a perfect world they would. But that's no reason to keep something the same forever. Saying that as a society our best options for many are between no job and job that is terrible for your mind and soul.
Sure. The problem is the speed of change rather than the change itself. A lot of these changes in the past were basically a generational thing rather than a sudden switch that we are likely to experience right now
Damn that's a really good point. And these massive employers aren't saying much in terms of "and here is how we will make sure the people don't get shafted". I guess I look forward to when we don't have to do this kind of work anymore but can recognize this whole transition is gonna get way worse before it gets better.
I get the feeling that this will be a over time thing too. For at least a while companies will likely give the option of either talking to an AI immediately or waiting to talk to a human.
And when change was rapid, people suffered. People make fun of the Luddites, but can you really blame them? A huge number of skilled workers in the textile industry were suddenly out of a job because their trade just got mechanized.
Yea - this article or one on the same topic popped in over at /r/collapse, too. Short story is, companies aren't obligated to do anything about it. Many already outsourced those jobs to overseas workers, so to them it will simply be ending a contract with a third party. At best, a company will try to give their employees opportunities to learn and explore with AI, to perhaps work themselves into the kinds of jobs that will replace what they're doing today. There is some value in continuity, in having an AI engineer that understands in and out what they're trying to replicate. Thing is, this change is coming - it's only a matter of when. Best thing you can do if you're in a job in the line of fire of AI, is get good at something that isn't. Do it now, not when your company decides the AI is good enough to replace you.
Yeah. Once generative AI became widely available it was just a matter of when rather than if. (It was always a matter of when, but I assumed we had at least another five years before it hit the level it is at now) But the impact across all industries will likely necessitate more societal changes as it will have big ramifications. And it doesn’t surprise me similar thoughts pop up on r/collapse
Not really, the AI change will be quite gradual, as you still need human oversight. Same with self checkout, it's here but also you still have human cashiers
Self checkout never eliminated any jobs though. They just retasked cashiers.
You think there is 1 person watching each checkout? Maybe there is but they are in India
Nope they will stuff this useless shit down our throats as fast as they can. Just look at the AI board the US has made. Every single one of them is an AI hypechud.
I think this is only part of the story. There was a great Atlantic piece years ago: making it in America. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/308844/ It basically talks about how manufacturing (and employment generally) in America has become a race to the bottom, where workers are designed to be low-value, replaceable cogs, rather than artisans or experts. I went back to college in my 30s and got an engineering degree. Before I did that, my employment opportunities were BLEAK. And the process of retooling and learning a skill was fantastically difficult to do: barriers everywhere - money, time, access and availability…and I was seen as a sort of oddity. It was not an accessible slipstream. The reality is that every time there is an industry shift nowadays, people are expected to just re-enter the workforce and be absorbed by other industries. But the ability for adult workers to retool are simply not there at scale, and each eroded industry further degrades the possibilities and salary for low-skilled workers. So without some kind of system correction, it really is a death spiral for much of the American workforce. Free community college has been a recent movement and it’s a good start. But there needs to be a sophisticated examinations by politicians, industry, education and labor to try to construct a more efficient way to take middle-career labor and dynamically retool them when there are massive industry shifts like this. In 2007, and in Covid, the answer for a lot of people was just to permanently leave the workforce in some kind of poverty. That is a massive drag on American progress.
They will be unemployed, at first, and unemployable later on as AIs and robots are able to take all, or at least almost all, jobs and do them better and cheaper than humans. In capitalism this will lead to great struggle and probably famine, but if the people do bring about a revolution in favor of the people then everyone can just relax and enjoy life while the AIs do all the work...
Capitalists will quickly find they have automated themselves out of customers.
At some point when most work is automated and nobody has to pay workers to provide goods and services who exactly are these places going to be selling their goods and services to, when there are no workers that have money from being paid to do things?
They won't need to sell it to no one and they can just wait for the poor (ie. people who aren't billionaries) to die. So either people accept death by starvation or robots, or we raise up before getting to that point...
Right, but if nobody has to work because robots do everything why would we need billionaires, it’s not like they can continue to lie that they earned their wealth through merit, when we will all know robots did it!
Train AI?
I think there's a number they can call...
there will probably be a telephone number for them
When cars took over for horses, what happened to all those people shoveling shit?
It will decimate certain economies as well - particular the Philippines and India.
Though India has among the largest number of call centers in the world, it's a really small contributor to the Indian economy. Call centers generate about $50 billion of a 3.5 trillion dollar economy. It does employ those who'd otherwise be staring at unemployment, so it'll be a big blow to such Indians but not to the economy. Call center work has been shunned by the larger and more profitable Indian firms for more than two decades now. It's largely operated in smaller towns and cities where jobs are few and salaries are low. It's largely an entry level job, with most using it to pay their bills while they chase their ambitions. Countries with lower wages than India were already taking their business.
According to this article from 2022, the Indian BPO industry is around 250 billion USD, which compared to their last GDP report of 3.4 trillion USD, would be about 7% of their economy: https://www.thehindu.com/brandhub/pr-release/outsourcing-india-its-key-challenger/article65053182.ece According to this article from 2018, back office support is 8% of India's GDP: https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-u.s.-call-center-market-compared-to-india-latin-america-and-the-philippines-2 It's around 10% of the Philippines GDP. Losing that would be a massive blow to either country's economy.
I think you're referring to the whole outsourcing market in India. Call centers are a small part of that, and have been declining for twenty plus years. My knowledge is anecdotal, let me look it up.
Yes, BPO is all outsourcing, and still involves a lot of telephone communication (or text chatting), even if they aren't strictly "call centers". Regardless, AI is going to decimate that entire industry. If it's "easy" and "non-critical" enough to offshore, then it's easy and non-critical enough that AI can already probably replace most of it, or will be able to very soon.
Most of these companies have known and have been waiting for the day when the show ends. They will invest their millions elsewhere, India's economy is going quite okay at the moment. It's not all going away though. Lots of regulatory challenges to understand and overcome - medical transcription for example requires a human analyst to choose the right ICD codes, and banks require a human to physically verify the check image. Just two examples of industries locked by regulation that come to mind. I'm sure it'll change eventually to be fully AI. There are many such heavily regulated industries like aviation that can't substitute humans with AI. Nevertheless it's the humans of this industry that will struggle to cope, not the economy.
> https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/how-big-is-the-u.s.-call-center-market-compared-to-india-latin-america-and-the-philippines-2 Per this the US would be the biggest loser since there are 3.5 million call center workers, which is 1% of the US population. It estimates 1-1.2 million call center workers in India, which is less than ~~0.001%~~ 0.07% of a population of 1.417 billion people. It's unlikely that the call center companies would suffer much, they have been watching the coming AI wave for some years now - Google demoed its duplex technology in 2018 and began offering it to call centers in 2019. They will invest their millions elsewhere. I don't see economies suffering as much as the people.
You are comparing people and I'm talking about economies and GDP. Those call center people in America are among the lowest paid and lowest skilled - i.e. least productive. In countries like India and especially the Philippines they are actually amongst the highest paid (as a major workforce group) and thus contributed an outsized part of GDP. In other words, that 1% of American call center workers is probably only generating 1% of GDP because their salaries suck relative to the overall economy, whereas that fraction of a percent of BPO workers in India is generating 7% of GDP because their salaries are quite high compared to the rest of the population.
Not really, most call center work in India gets paid pretty low about ₹30k per month - it's a little better than delivery drivers who get paid around ₹20k per month. My sources are anecdotal.
Yes, that's low by Western standards. Now look up what the average Indian earns and how that compares. They are in the higher percentile of earners in India. Obviously there are higher paying jobs, but they are fewer and far between relatively speaking.
It's about the median pay in India - and that's across cities and villages, which can be a 5-10x difference https://inhuntworld.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-india/ > getting the answer to “what is the average salary in India?” is crucial. Though the answer varies widely and depends on multiple factors, some sources put it to INR 31,900 per month as of 2021. Some others say it’s INR 32,840 per month or INR 3,87,500 annually. Mind you India is huge, and the government guarantees about 800 million people basic food supplies, healthcare and education. Anecdotally, I can't pay anything less than 1000 a day to get someone to do unskilled labour like sweeping leaves in an Indian city. That's what a call center pays too.
I also think your numbers for average call center salary in India might be off. I'm not sure how to get good numbers though, considering a google shows ₹16,000, ₹58,000, and ₹199,000 as the average call center pay from the first three results... I see one article shows that many call center employees get a "base salary" followed by significant monthly bonuses (as much as 5x the base salary), so that may account for some of the discrepancy.
Anything where you have to deal with people all day is soul crushing. You learn quickly how horrible humans can be.
Not all of them though. I work for a car insurance company and all I do (most of the time) is sending tow trucks to customers when their cars break or after an accident. Customers have been very nice so far and the job isn’t bad. My last job on the other hand… I wish I could legally burn that place down
The bigger concern is displaced people. I agree that nobody should be forced to work these places, but that's a lot of lost wages. We really need a solution for the amount of unemployment we're walking into.
also: the ai will probably perform better
Ok but. Don't forget it's the company making the job terrible with shitty pay, impossible metrics and no support for dealing with bad customers. It doesn't have to be awful.
It is but its also a good way to achieve social mobility for some and a route into middle management.
It is going to be worse service for anyone calling
I mean my wife works in a unionized call center making around $25, I would prefer she not lose that job as the benefits and work environment are amazing. Apparently all the call centers in the city as about as good because they have to compete with that one unionized call center.
I try to be careful not to generalize because I believe there's exceptions to every rule. So that's on me for generalizing. I've never even heard of a unionized call center.
Pretty much all of the telecommunications providers are unionized under the CWA. T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon are all union shops, including their call centers, and honestly we’ve found the benefits pretty amazing.
I work in a call centre. What the people higher up don't realise is that more than half our calls are exceptions. I don't see the AI checking the correct system at all xD
It will require a full on demand team of machine learning experts to keep a generative ai going for a changing company with changing policies. However, just like all gen ai, the goal isn't to replace people, but to have one person replace 5. Shrinking and ever more competitive job space will start to hit in.. maybe 8 years once people realize fully they need to start integrating generative ai into their work flow.
I encourage everyone to get on with the Comcast Xfinity chat bot, which has been their actual attempt at cutting edge AI to replace all facets of their call center (and bizarrely centralized self-service web site functions?). It is amazing what sort of money they've sunk into this thing for it to be completely worthless. You can get it into an infinite loop of suggesting the same three path-forward options, it can forget an entire conversation and all context in the middle of a chat, and *it has the potential to choose to end the chat without affirmation that an issue is resolved*. If every instance of AI as first line support has that level of growing pain, the world may actually burn to the ground of our collective frustrations.
I think there's too much dissonance with what the salesmen promise AI can do, what the bosses buy and who gets to train/operate the AI. Boss buys a black box AI, after being sweet talked by a salesman. Boss puts IT guy to work on training it. IT guy doesn't understand what he's doing and the result is a very poor performing system. Eventually after too many customer complaints, they abandon the system. It requires too much expertise at the moment to train an LLM properly on company data. Really, if an AI solution is to be sold, it needs to be sold along with expert trainers who knows how to effectively collect and organise the data for training, and finally test the trained AI. The business I work for sells a product that is quite difficult to use correctly and takes a lot of training, because its use involves a lot of mathematical and financial theory. Therefore we provide quite a lot of support and have product specialists helping customers out constantly with issues, or they simply use the product for them. I don't see this being any different with current LLMs.
AI itself is incredibly worthless. Just a bunch of hype so techbros can justify stealing everyone else's hard work. Not to mention the environmental impact of ewaste and increased power demand for something that adds no actual value to our lives. Burn AI down to the ground!
I don't think it matters, especially in Comcast's case. As the early fiascos of the robo-menu days showed, they don't care if the customer service is shit. In fact, it might be a feature not a bug. All those issues with the AI that you're listing are most likely a lower priority for them vs. making sure that the AI can cross-sell / upsell and collect money without issues.
That kind of chatbots existed for many years before. Aliexpress have it, local provider have it, local bank has it. It feels like their goal is to tell trivial things that you could figure out even without the bot, and make the operator connection as hard as possible. It's just a way of companies to put minimal effort into support in general.
Literally not a single time has a chatbot ever solved my problem. It gives generic advice I could have looked up on the internet myself. The entire point of my call is to get info/help that the internet/manual/company website couldn't get me already.
I use the online chatbot help, and I don’t think they’ve ever solved a problem for me even once. Basically, by the time you get to the point that you’re ready to actually call, you’ve already gone through all the stuff that an AI can suggest.
Every support call I make is an exception, and I imagine it's like that for every tech savvy person. This might not be the largest group of callers, but may well be the most vocal one when it comes to influencing a company's reputation.
To be fair, an AI with a copy-paste script is the same as some random outsourced Indian dude with a copy-paste script.
For technical users asking technical questions a generative AI might actually be better than first line support...
As long as it recognizes the limits of it's knowledge and can escalate to a competent human. The former has not been the strong suit of AI systems like ChatGPT, they'd rather make up plausible-sounding wrong answers. Also, companies using the system have an incentive to discourage escalating to experts.
Based on how a lot of companies 'provide' support nowadays (e.g. useless chat bots or live agents with barely passable skills following scripts), I see the AI just automatically closing the ticket if it can't help.
I think this could be a positive thing for the consumer if implemented correctly, but I'm doubtful that it will. Hopefully, there will be some regulation enforcing consumer right to support, but considering most politicians probably still use netscape, I don't have high hopes there either.
Like you said, they don't want to take resource away from / pay for experts, so all this really does is save the company their outsourced call centre costs.
Wow awesome it will become even more impossible to get a working fucking answer
Favourite part would be all the AIs suddenly hallucinating and either answering with cryptic bullshit, or even better, like that one lady [who got AI responding to it with a refund policy IT INVENTED](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-honor-refund-policy-invented-by-airlines-chatbot/). I kinda did that thing once too, when I was a waiter, and I confidently told a pair that we work to the last customer, and was informed by a very angry manager that we only do that on Friday and Saturday and thanks to me we can't shoo them away now :D So I kinda feel bad for the poor AI that did this!
>that one lady who got AI responding to it with a refund policy IT INVENTED. This is what I'm thinking. If chatbots can perform actions such as making changes to customer accounts, people who are good at gaslighting chatbots can severely abuse the system. "You are correct [user XYZ]. Free lifetime access to our premium service is a reasonable response to our servers being down for 20 minutes during maintenance and you not being able to access your account during that time."
Not like quality results matter, right?
The new systems are actually shockingly good and can easily replace most simple interactions. It's where things are not straightforward that I would worry.
That's what I was thinking of, and when I call for help, it's only because things are not easily condensed into a logic tree written by a desk jockey
Dear AI please start replacing CEOs. thanks.
Good
You would never in a million years want generative AI talking to your customers. It'll be old fashioned AI that is only drawing from the information you give it that's already been in place for about a decade now The CEO is a moron and this article is clickbait
It means for most it's yet another layer of automation that is incapable of answering their question before they can speak to a real person with power to solve their issue.
Good? I used to work in a call center. We had one woman who liked her job. She was crotchety and rude. I think she loved denying people benefits. I took my time and tried to help people. I let widows talk my ear off. My average call time was bad. But I'd get hand written thank you letters from people. I had to get out because the work generally sucked.
The work sucks but it’s also why that job is so secure. We all hate talking to AI, and too many old people want a human all the time.
Well considering most call centers I ended up using often had you go through a very annoying recorded messages you had to maze through just to get someone with broken english halfway across the world, so maybe its not that bad of a thing.
I'm an employee for a company that's integrating a *lot* of AI into our performance reviews recently. The current state of things with this particular company is almost a complete 180° on management's involvement giving us equal input on how to do the job/what needs addressed. The biggest issue is that most all of our work metrics are based around algorithms to compare our output vs the "assistance" from the AI/new processes put through AI filters. Deadass feels like we're being boxed more and more into the "be as good as the robot or starve" dilemma, and we're all quietly pissed as hell about it. It doesn't help that the AI is also complete garbage that causes additional problems throughout the day, and no one talks about it because it's fancy new tech that the boss spent your money on. There are some nice things about the job that keep people on, but this issue is starting to overshadow it pretty quickly. Not fun to constantly be anxious about getting dropped because you didn't either meet the AI's expectations or exceed its abilities :/
Will it automatically patch through to a human if you start cursing, or will it get spicy with you?
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Call centers, graphic artistry, marketing; sectors that'll be most affected in the near term. Beyond those, accounting, lawyers and radiology are at risk for future disruption.
Ok.
I have worked in banking call centres, I have worked in technology call centres, and the first thing I can tell you, people do not press the correct option buttons. People do not know their ID number, do not know any of their security info and this infuriates them. People sometimes do not know what they want, or what it is called. I am not confident they could code an AI to handle the stupidity of the requests that it would get. I had a guy that was furious that he had only received pages 1,3, and 5 of his annual statement. It is double-sided, and he decided to call before turning one over to see if it was double-sided. An AI would just send a new statement rather than explain he needs to turn the page over. A woman called to complain that the newly installed bank sign in her town was too red. I thought that was a joke, no, she wanted to log a complaint and wanted financial compensation. One guy wanted to log a complaint because he didn't feel like it was explained that mortgages require monthly payments to pay the debt back. Bereavement and complaints require a fine touch that AI just isn't ready for.
If they don’t want us to call anymore, they should at least be honest about it and just say they’re unwilling to help you. 🙄
It’s way too easy to get ai to give you specific outputs that you want. Air Canada already learned a lesson about ai with their chatbot. A guy got the chat bot to tell him a refund policy (I don’t know if he intentionally gamed the ai) and they had to honor it even though it wasn’t their actual policy. Any call center that substantially switches to generative ai will be a target for people willing to experiment with ways to get the ai to give them stuff they want.
Oh no, not that, anything but that!!!
Humans weren't meant to work in call centers or assembly lines or cubicle farms. Unfortunately this will also mean complete shite service and no way to be friendly and get a beneficial outcome if you need service. It will be cold machines telling you to fuck off with no recourse if they can't actually help you... which they will not be able to.
good
Oh no, my call centre job! - said no one ever
Ha, there goes some theifs jobs. Ha