The economy is “on the verge” of experiencing the “revolution” of artificial intelligence (AI), which will fully affect “almost all” jobs, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warns in its latest report. . And in many cases it is feared that the decision is to replace some jobs developed by workers with a conversational chatbot.
This is what the Indian startup Dukaan has grabbed, which has fired 90% of the employees of its customer service team to replace them with this machine, capable of having a conversation with a person and solving some of their problems. That cut of 90% of the workforce means 23 layoffs.
The CEO of the company, Suumit Shah, defends that it is a “difficult” decision, but “absolutely necessary”: “Given the state of the economy, new companies are prioritizing profitability over trying to become ‘unicorns’, and so do we.”
It is not the only company that has cut staff, to replace it with AI. Domestika proposed the dismissal of half of its staff in Spain. The work of some was linked to translation services, a task that from now on will be automated by machine translation applications. That is, it will be assumed by technology.
Shah claims that Dukaan has come out on top. According to this entrepreneur, the time for the first response in the support chat has dropped from 1:44 minutes to instant. He has also improved the time it takes to solve a case: from 2:13 hours to 3:12 minutes. And most importantly for the manager, that customer support costs have been reduced by 85%.
At first, the CEO of this Indian company was skeptical about the use of AI. In a Twitter thread, Shah says that the chatbot’s first responses were vague and generic. However, little by little they improved the software and now it answers all kinds of queries quickly and accurately.
“In the era of instant gratification, starting a business is no longer a distant dream”, celebrates the person in charge, who assures that it is only necessary to have “the right idea” and “the right team”, to turn “entrepreneurial dreams into reality”.
Shah’s decision has generated great controversy among Twitter users. “You interrupted the lives of 90% of your support team and you are celebrating in public. You will also probably destroy your customer service,” one reproaches him in a response. And another invited him to share the score and customer feedback after the change: “Would you be willing to share it?”
