The CEO of an e-commerce company who caused uproar by declaring he had replaced the majority of his support personnel with a chatbot thinks that copy-pasting professions are obsolete due to AI.
Suumit Shah, the CEO of the Duukan company based in India, said, the job is no longer available, 100%.
Shah was referring to customer support representatives who frequently use copy-paste responses. He clarified his statement by pointing out that not all customer support representatives should be concerned about being replaced, though.
He continued, Replacing the entire team with a bot that is like 100 times smarter, who is instant, and who costs him like one hundredth of what he used to pay to the support team was [a] no-brainer for him.
Shah gained notoriety in July after tweeting that he had fired 90% of his customer service employees and replacing them with a chatbot that he claimed performed better.
This AI chatbot forced them to fire 90% of the customer service staff. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Of course, Shah stated in his post, which has since received over 2.7 million page views on the network.
On the website X, now known as Twitter, and Reddit, his message triggered a ferocious criticism. One user wrote: “How not to announce layoffs.”
Make no mistake., wrote another user. The support staff was let go since the company is struggling and cash is scarce. Not as a result of AI.
Shah revealed in July that 23 out of the 26 employees of his customer support team lost their jobs as a result of the layoffs, which took place in September of last year. He noted that with the layoffs, his monthly budget for customer service dropped to $100.
At the time, Shah admitted that despite feeling bad about starting a discussion about layoffs on Twitter, he was adamant in his position.
He added, AI is stealing our jobs, and eventually everyone will start doing this, not just them. It’s possible that he was too frank to have posted it on Twitter.
The business has expanded since July, the CEO said through email on Friday. Their customer service crew is now smaller but far more effective. In terms of the budget, let’s just say that money has been redistributed to promote innovation and growth, he continued.
How AI will affect employment is a subject of great concern. Around 300 million employment could be affected by technology, according to a Goldman Sachs estimate published in May.
Not everybody, nevertheless, agrees with Shah’s viewpoints.
Industry titans in the tech industry, including IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, have already expressed their belief that AI will generate more jobs than it would eliminate.
