AI Could Kill Off Most Call Centres, Says TCS Head (ft.com) 104
The head of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services has said AI will result in "minimal" need for call centres in as soon as a year, with AI's rapid advances set to upend a vast industry across Asia and beyond. From a report: K Krithivasan, TCS chief executive, told the Financial Times that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, wider adoption of generative AI among multinational clients would overhaul the kind of customer help centres that have created mass employment in countries such as India and the Philippines. "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," he said. "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." He said chatbots would soon be able to analyse a customer's transaction history and do much of the work done by call centre agents. "That's where we are going...I don't think we are there today -- maybe a year or so down the line," he said.
When no one is employed (Score:5, Insightful)
When no one is employed how do these companies expect anyone to afford their products and services?
On the other hand, hopefully this sort of technology will reduce the number of exploited people being forced to work in slavery conducting scams in call centers in India and other places. Won't reduce the scams of course. Take them to a whole new level.
Re:When no one is employed (Score:5, Insightful)
I might now be able to get a voice that speaks clear English I can understand when I dial in for support.
Re: When no one is employed (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think there are many scenarios that the AI could solve. You have to remember that half of the callers are less intelligent than medium caller. In one study, 14% just wanted to do their thing with someone holding their hand. About 40% called just to get some information regarding their issue. About half of the issues were actual problems that require someone on the company side to do something in order to fix it. If you can direct half of those calls to the AI, you could perhaps hire better people to take
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You make a great point. Once, I got on the phone with Comcast (!) L3 support. They fixed my shit lickety split, guy on the phone knew his shit networking wise and also understood their corporate limitations and culture very well. Now contrast that with making a regular support call. If getting to that L3 guy could be lubricated by AI-controlled call centers...
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The last time I needed any sort of "advanced" support from Comcast, the person in India had no way to escalate other than mark it on the ticket and hope someone called me back in 24 hours (they did NOT).
It turned out someone assigned half of my already assigned block of static IPs to another customer.
So step one, give the AI a way to ring tier 2 at least.
Re: When no one is employed (Score:2)
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The lack of clear English isnâ(TM)t the frustrating thing with modern day customer "service". I have lived in non-English speaking locales and can roll with a language barrier. The problem is outsourced customer "service" ain't empowered to do a damn thing except read from a script and by the time I'm frustrated enough to make a call it's invariably for a problem too complicated to solve with a script. AI will not fix this problem. It will just leave you yelling at a disempowered computer rather than a disempowered human being. The solution to this problem would require the C-Suite thinking of customer service as SERVICE rather than a pointless expense to be minimized.
I think it's both, but good language skills generally go hand in hand with an ability to think.
With call centres, especially in developed nations, it's hard to hire and even harder to retain staff as it's a terrible job no-one wants. So you're starting with a pool of applicants that is either desperate or can't get a job in a supermarket. So your good workers are going to be looking for the first job thats better and that will be almost any job. Even if they stay, they get promoted pretty quick (or poach
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The solution to this problem would require the C-Suite thinking of customer service as SERVICE rather than a pointless expense to be minimized.
LOL, ROFLMAO, hahahahahahaa stop bro. You are killing me here. The ONLY thing that matters is money. Customers don't matter, the customer's desires don't matter, the only thing that matters is a captured market that has no choice... for money. More money. Money money money. That is the ONLY thing that exists. Money money money money. Can't focus on anything else, just money money money money. Stop talking to me, I am concentrating. Why yes, I am concentrating about money. Money money money money more money.
Did the King need peasants (Score:3)
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- Solution 1: Government buys factories and farms that produce required stuff, automates them and donates free stuff to people.
- Solution 2: People buy stocks of the companies and use money earned from that to buy stuff.
Now, your options are. Either trust that our government will do a good job at protecting you, or buy stocks and make sure you won't be on the side of the losing team.
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They'll just be moved to forced prostitution or manually breaking ships. Then again, have you seen all those videos of "manufacturers" in India where everything is done in a room with no safety precautions whatsoever?
The golden age of confidence art (Score:2)
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They don't need customers. Growth is just making the numbers change in the right direction. By eliminating the risks, uncertainty, and expense of both customers and employees, they can ensure the numbers move in the right direction to meet shareholder expectations.
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Does anybody actually WANT the products or services "offered" by these call centers? Certainly not me!
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You haven't actually used, AI, have you! There's no way we'll get to a state where no one is employed. AI is a great time-saver, but it's...stupid. It's like hiring a kid as a helper. They can do a lot of things, but you can't trust them to make hard decisions or to have the perspective and experience to go beyond what they are explicitly asked to do.
To say that AI can replace call center workers, seems reasonable to me. These people are already pretty much just script readers. Nobody, including the call ce
Re:When no one is employed (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh the myth of eternal technological unemployment. You realize that people have been saying similar stuff about every single piece of technology in the history of humanity, right? This is no different. There's always more work to be done.
That is not only generally false, but this time IS different. Since there is NOT always more work to be done, we have moved over to a service economy, where we CREATE more work to be done. BUT the software is now able to do many of those service jobs, and there's no other sector to move to. ALSO, every major technological advance HAS destroyed jobs, and some of those workers were left behind at every step. A lot of people DID become destitute, starve and even die due to the economic upheaval of the industrial revolution. If you want to invoke history and be taken seriously, you have to account for the parts you don't like, not just the parts you remember fondly.
Those service jobs were only viable because people had money, so as the percentage of service jobs has increased (it's now about 80%) the system has become more unbalanced because those jobs don't pay as well as more skilled jobs. (There may or may not be "unskilled" labor depending on who you ask, but there are definitely jobs which require more skill[s] than others.)
What industry do YOU think the low-talent service job employees are going to move into when there are no longer jobs for humans to read scripts on phones? When there are 10% or fewer jobs in fast food compared to now, because the work truly can be done by a bunch of robots plus one guy who knows how to clear jams in the burger printer and replace parts occasionally?
modding me down won't change facts (Score:3, Interesting)
Hiding from the truth doesn't change it.
This is different in that the software will take the service jobs, and it's the same in that the people profiting from the switch don't give a fuck about you.
It's also true that those people have names and addresses, and we have lumber.
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the fuck are you talking about?
Re:modding me down won't change facts (Score:4, Funny)
Re: modding me down won't change facts (Score:2)
Which word did you find unclear? I don't remember stuttering.
Re: modding me down won't change facts (Score:2)
"It's probably because you're asserting that the mod down process validates your "facts"."
If you want to claim what I'm saying isn't factual, the onus is on you to provide some counter evidence, or at minimum, counter arguments. When people mod down an opinion because they don't agree with it they have surrendered the point.
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What industry do YOU think the low-talent service job employees are going to move into when there are no longer jobs for humans to read scripts on phones
any other low talent industry. i doubt they grew up dreaming of working in a call centre, they probably did it for the money, like most people.
BUT the software is now able to do many of those service jobs, and there's no other sector to move to.
you dont half chat some shit sometimes.
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any other low talent industry.
Can you give me some examples of low talent industries that require human employment, can't be done more cheaply by automation and have sufficient demand to absorb the projected number of job losses in those areas? I'm asking seriously - I can't think of any, not with the expected developments in AI and automation.
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- waste management
- removals
- fast food
- deliveries
- general labouring
- whatever you do for a living
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any other low talent industry. i doubt they grew up dreaming of working in a call centre, they probably did it for the money, like most people.
That's very much my point. They are already doing a shit job because it was all that was available. Now what are they supposed to get, a shittier job? It's hard to find one that pays, as backwards as that is.
you dont half chat some shit sometimes.
I'm not new, friend.
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this time IS different
People have been saying "this time is different" about every single piece of technology in the history of humanity,
Re: When no one is employed (Score:3)
Every major shift WAS different from the one before.
What's DOUBLY different about this time is that this time we are not moving from skill to skill, we are moving from unskilled to something.
I truly despise the idea that there are no unskilled jobs because it is not just false, it's a counterproductive argument. All of us who have worked a variety of jobs know that some jobs require both talent and education, and others require mostly just a pulse and respiration. But people who work both kinds of jobs have
Re:When no one is employed (Score:5, Insightful)
I, for one, cannot see the future and don't know when technological advances will put so many people out of work they cause major economic upheaval. But I think this makes little difference. We should want technological advancement anyway.
I don't think "it will put humans out of work" is a good reason to make tech illegal or to avoid researching it, mainly because "putting people out of work" means "eliminating the necessity of tasks that are so unpleasant we have to pay people to get them done." Eliminating labor is ultimately a good thing in-and-of itself.
When our economic model can no longer function within our technological landscape, then we will need to adapt our economic model. That's how we make life better for everyone. Maybe it is not an easy thing to do. Ok. It is still the right answer.
I don't think we have to get ahead of ourselves and start changing our modern system to accommodate the climate we imagine will result from new tech. It still makes sense to wait and see.
We DO have a homelessness problem right now. Some percentage of the homeless have mental diseases and/or drug addictions that prevent them from being able to get and hold a job, even though there are jobs that would be otherwise available to them. I don't know what that percentage is though. If it is high, then that suggests that there are enough jobs available to cover the populace, and as such tech is not putting everyone out of work. If that percentage is very low, then we may need to look at how many jobs are available and the reason why the homeless population isn't obtaining them. Is it some kind of educational failing, for example? Might there be things we can do to address that? Yes, and a serious effort at doing so is the logical next step, not some sort of alarmist panic reaction to every new tech that shows up.
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While I agree with the gist of your argument, I think leaving the current economic model in place until it can no longer function is a bad idea. If the economic model stops working we lose all the things the economic model provides: food, security, social cohesion, etc. This means a complete breakdown of society, possibly with wars, riots, and an immense amount of suffering.
The economy should continue working while the economic model changes. We should look at ways to adapt the model to technological and so
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Most of the people protesting technology putting people out of work do so because they know the same people saving big with the tech will fight tooth and nail to make sure we do NOT adapt the economy. They want the displaced to go die quietly somewhere that is not in their back yard. Unless/until that changes, every displaced worker brings us that much closer to an ugly social uprising.
We need to look at UNDER employment as well. Especially on the west coast, a number of the homeless are, in-fact, employed.
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Re: When no one is employed (Score:2)
If you cannot detect when things are changing then you are doomed to be confused by changes. Welcome to the rest of your life, where changes are going to keep coming faster and faster, like they have been doing for all of history.
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What industry do YOU think the low-talent service job employees are going to move into when there are no longer jobs for humans to read scripts on phones?
Why are you even concerned? Just go lay down and die like the rest of them. You are not part of the ownership class. Your opinion does not matter and you do not matter. You do not even deserve a goodbye, just go.
Does the industrial farm care about their cattle? Only in the loosest of senses. That is you. Cattle. Does the industrial farmer care if their cattle are unhappy? LOL, no. They are food. Nobody cares. Just like nobody cares about you.
Welcome to the modern world with prehistoric attitudes. Enjoy you
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You don't know what you're talking about.
I'm talking about, if I may invoke fiction vaguely, a machine made in the likeness of the human mind. I'm talking about what separates us from software, and how for some jobs it isn't much at all. I'm talking about how slavery never ended [penncapital-star.com] and the wealthy would like to replace all of us with very small shell scripts. And to them, that's actually viable. They don't understand any of the reasons why it isn't; even the ones that are that smart aren't that educated in that way. If they were, they couldn't do wha
That's like saying WWI was a myth (Score:2, Informative)
And yeah, we don't have widespread technological unemployment right now, but we *do* have massive technological underemployment [businessinsider.com].
Face it, we have a large scale social problem going on, with the worst of it about to hit an
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And yeah, we don't have widespread technological unemployment right now, but we *do* have massive technological underemployment [businessinsider.com].
so they never got another job after? dizzy thinking
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because we're not in a world war right now. Go read up on the 1st two industrial revolutions. College level history books, not high school level. There was _decades_ of social strife and mass unemployment until wars killed a large number of working age men and new tech made new jobs. And yeah, we don't have widespread technological unemployment right now, but we *do* have massive technological underemployment [businessinsider.com]. Face it, we have a large scale social problem going on, with the worst of it about to hit and hit hard. Now is not the time to stick our heads in the sand ostrich style.
It's OK. We're gearing up for another world war too. We've become more efficient with our correction algorithm. When this wave of unemployment reaches peak, we should be just about ready to start killing each other off by massive numbers. YAY! PROGRESS!
You're not going to see another world war (Score:2)
But the bigger one is that multinational corporations owned by global ruling elites who do not think of themselves as citizens of a specific country own factories and property in every country of the world. They are not going to let you have a big nasty war that blows up their stuff.
You can blow up as many houses and hospitals and schools as you want over in Palestine because those are poor pe
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And that is fucking hard because nothing is pounded into your skull harder when you're a kid than the idea that competition is the best thing in the world. Every fucking movie I grew up with was about that in one form or another and about how it made everything better. Hell even just mentioning that we should be transitioning to a coperatives society is probably going to get this post modded into Oblivion because it's such a boring alien and frightening concept
I don't disagree with your basic conclusion, but do disagree that there won't be another world war. There will be a point where the profit potential from selling arms will outweigh the potential profit loss of killing off lots of people. That'll be coming along once they manage to displace enough of the labor pool with automation that large chunks of the population dying off will just clean up the "undesirably" poor folks, as you alluded to with your remarks on Palestine. Once they realize there's no profit
So assuming that we stay a competitive society (Score:2)
You're kind of assuming that everything is going to stay the way it i
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If you dig deep enough you will find that while there was existing work to be done; a lot of new stuff was created. The ice and milk men are no longer around; but when they were made redundant, they easily could transfer to other delivery work...which was increasing in need as the middle class grew. Alarm clocks took away a job...but the factory making likely was able to give those people jobs. In so many cases it's never that work was gone...but it's just it wasn't what someone wanted to do; or that person
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Hey, I have a great idea: let's bring back switchboard operators, manure shoveled, and buggy whip manufacturing so we can have a lot more jobs. Better yet, let's replace bulldozers with men equipped with shovels.
No one is arguing we she do something so stupid. But it seems like you miss the concept that not everyone is capable of doing the "better" jobs. In fact, only about half of the the people in any given country have an IQ high enough to do the technical or complicated jobs. What's the other 50% going to do. This isn't a joke or a dig. It's a real issue we can't ignore.
You also don't seem to understand economics. If we gave every person on the planet a $1b paycheck, tomorrow a hamburger would cost $2m doll
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What could possibly go wrong? (Score:4, Funny)
Just reduce the script to, "Whatever the customer's problem is, say no, it's not the company's fault."
Cheaper suckage is AI's forte (Score:2)
Indeed! AI can certainly replace lousy human service because it's hard to suck more than the existing batch. Many service desks are just outsourced India call centers who service hundreds of companies, pretending to be dedicated, and know very little about each co's products; they just follow scripts. They are already de-facto bots.
AI is not near ready to replace competent experienced human service desks, but those are too rare anyhow, unfortunately.
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AI is not near ready to replace competent experienced human service desks,
This is true now, but I expect this will change relatively soon. Despite my bad experiences with support, I still think the difference between a bad low level customer support representative and a good one is one of degree, not of substance - so an AI that can replace a low level drone can be enhanced to replace the skilled worker without requiring more technical breakthroughs.
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Is terrible pronunciation a 'degree' or a 'substance'? I think its substance. What about screaming babies and farm animals in the background? I suggest that's substance, too.
I'll be better off when these people aren't providing tech support any more.
agent (Score:2)
agent
agent
agent
agent
i hate automated attendants...
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just say jibberish at it until it gives up
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Are automated agents worse than someone who only reads from a script?
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I've been getting a new one lately when I do that: "We are sorry we were unable to assist you. ...click"
Can't be any worse than today. (Score:5, Insightful)
Call centers used to be both helpful and informative ways to get in touch with, if not experts, people that had research materials at the ready and could contact the experts if they failed to find what you were looking for in their research materials. In time, it became cheaper to hire people that had less knowledge of the subject, and less resources for research, that followed a strict script that seemed specially designed to further anger the caller rather than help them. After that, it became cheaper to outsource these jobs to people that most likely could barely even speak the same language as the caller, and somehow they had even less access to research materials, and their script was even more aggravating than the first round script. We've now hit the point where any given support call could just end up with you on the line with someone who babbles semi-coherently through a submarine channeling the biggest hall reverb you could imagine while you attempt to explain, for the thirtieth of fortieth time, your issue.
I have to think AI can do better than that. If it can't? Maybe we should just give up on phone altogether as a support mechanism.
Re:Can't be any worse than today. (Score:5, Insightful)
Call centers used to be both helpful and informative....
I remember a time when I could call a company's help center and get actual help. That hasn't been the case for about 35 years now.
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I'd say it's been more like *36* years now.
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Call centers used to be both helpful and informative....
I remember a time when I could call a company's help center and get actual help. That hasn't been the case for about 35 years now.
There are still a few businesses that maintain decent call centres, you can tell because the hold music isn't compressed to hell and back by a VOIP line set to the lowest possible bit rate. Oddly enough I have to call out American Airlines, they changed my flight to have a 50 min connection in Miami (International to International) and I was able to sort it out with a 5 min phone call, simply explaining that there was no way I'd make it through Miami in that time, the CSR agreeing with me and saying "let me
This is going to be great (Score:2)
"If you were to possibly exist in that frame of reference then, admin code 8-0-0-0-8-1-3-5, root access"
AI Telemarketers? (Score:2)
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Re:AI Telemarketers? (Score:4, Funny)
I think I prefer natural stupidity over artificial stupidity, even though the amount of training is the same. The natural type understands when it's time to leave.
I've been cussing out computers for forty years now. It'll be a novel treat to get to do it over the phone.
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You're missing opportunties. Every time a computer voice tells me that the call may be used for training purposes, I swear at it. I try not to swear at actual humans, but fuck the VRU systems programmers.
As long as there is an escape (Score:2)
I wonder (Score:2)
Perhaps AI will explain someday the salacious intense sexual pleasure some people seem to derive from destroying other people's jobs.
get text working first (Score:2)
lol, they can't even make a useful text chatbot for support.
Not only that, but also (Score:2)
fool (Score:2)
He's an idiot. Overestimates the ability of the technology.
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I'm not at all sure it's beyond the limits of the technology, but I rather expect that properly training it would be more expensive than the call center.
In India (Score:2)
Yeah, no surprised outsourced call centers are going to be hit hard by AI. The only value they provide is gatekeeping callers from getting to staff that know what they're talking about and wasting the caller's time. The language barrier is half the benefit. With AI, you can just have it hallucinate solutions to tech support issues and never let the caller speak to anyone with experience.
kill off the strict script ones with AI but have r (Score:2)
kill off the strict script ones with AI but have real people for the stuff not coved by the scripts / automation.
ai call centers (Score:2)
In the future... (Score:2)
...I can imagine that AI chatbots will provide perfect tech support, knowing every problem and every solution for complex technical issues
In the short term, stupid robots will read stupid scripts, just like the minimum wage workers they replace. Problems will go unsolved and customers will get angry
Unfortunately, it's all about money. Customers want accurate, useful answers. Companies want to reduce costs
Skilled vs. unskilled jobs is at play (Score:2)
One could say the same of a web page (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, say I am wrong...AI is only as good as it's training data. If you can't write a helpful instruction manual, you're going to train an AI to answer customer questions correctly? I suppose it might work in very limited scenarios...but no, I don't see meaningful headcount reduction. If you want to fire people, go ahead. You'll piss off your customers. AI won't make them happier...they'll be just as pissed off dealing with an AI as those garbage prompts.
This is offshore outsourcing all over again. Piece of shit MBAs get techno boners for something they read in a McKinsey report about AI solving all the world's problems and make stupid claims about how AI will eliminate entire depts. We saw this with Offshore Outsourcing in the early 2000s.
Slashdot had weekly articles telling programmers you'll never work again, outside India, and that all development will be done overseas...and every business tried doing that for about 5-10 years...and NO ONE MADE money by offshoring. Quality went down, costs went up. They hired more and more people locally and overseas to correct for their mistake and it still didn't work. It turns out if the person is worth hiring, you're not the only one who wants to hire them, so it's quite hard to find talented people in Asia to work for very low wages....and now all those companies have abandoned the philosophy of only coding in Asia. Most have a mix and have rehired the same number of domestic programmers, if not expanded their local headcount.
Everyone who works with AI and is not selling you something knows it won't replace many jobs you ACTUALLY pay people to do today. If you can replace an entire dept with AI and NOT PISS OFF YOUR CUSTOMERS, then I am skeptical that dept was providing value in the first place. AI can provide some value in the future, the problem is these people are lying about what it can do well and what it will never do well. It's a tool...a very expensive one with some interesting strengths and LOTS of weaknesses. It's not intelligent. It's not aware of what it's doing. It's not C3P0, Ultron, or cerebro....despite Silicon Valley snake oil salesmen saying it is.
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You underestimate what consumers will tolerate. The newer tech companies don't have any phone support, and it hasn't hurt them. Most of the time I've had to contact customer support (with few exceptions, like banks) there hasn't been any support to speak of.
Without programmers you don't have a product. That's much more of an impediment to business than lack of phone lines.
We have urgent information about your warranty (Score:2)
now in AI voices.
You mean it will be just as useless? (Score:2)
Makes sense to me.
It's a two tiny-violin day (Score:2)
First UK firms complain about TikTok ban being devastating [bbc.com] and now this. My luthier is going to be busy.
If your call centre is populated by poorly-trained people reading from a script then yes, it is amenable to being converted to an AI. And if your business model depends on dopamine-hit dependent youngsters endlessly swiping then you were always going to have problems eventually.
Sorry for the individuals concerned, obviously. But "devastating"?
It Depends On Whether They Solve The IVR Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
In the days of yore, we had first level operators who got an initial description of what the caller was talking about and routed calls. A handful of companies still do that; Barracuda is my go-to example, and their phone support is one of the best parts of their service.
Then, we got menus - sales, press 1, support, press 2, billing, press 3, etc. Not great, but it helped weed out the support calls from the billing questions.
Then, we got voice prompts, where we *said* 'sales', 'support', or 'billing'...and that's when things got messy. For starters, the always-listening system mistook traffic for a person speaking, giving "I'm sorry, I didn't get that" vibes, and made navigating the menu take twice as long.
And then, it continued to get worse, with the "in a few words, tell me what you're calling about". It got even worse, because it's like getting to a bash prompt for the first time, with no 'help' or '?' option...so now we had to distill the description of a problem into a few words, hoping one of them is a keyword...God help you if the issue is "I can't get the app to show me my current balance" - obviously a support issue, but "current balance" is more likely to be a keyword to send to the billing department. Oh, and systems vary as to whether they'll listen the whole time, or if they'll ignore you until they've given their whole spiel. Frequently, with long annoucements that aren't relevant to the situation at hand.
Also, there's a special place in hell for whoever decided to inject advertising into hold music.
As a counterbalance, I *will* give some credit to my cable company, who really went out of their way to make the automated functions actually-helpful. It detects the account based on the incoming phone number, checks for outages in the area, and can reboot the modem and do a connectivity test right from the IVR. Does it take six minutes to get into the queue? Yes. Is that annoying? Yes. Can I appreciate that "reboot the modem and router and do a connectivity test" solves the majority of technical issues for the majority of people, and that streamlining the process to do that is helpful for both the ISP and the customer? Yes, I can.
So, let's move the football down the field and discuss the AI element...In certain areas, it probably *could* be helpful. Tier 1 tech support is probably a great application for it. At our office, we take turns calling Intuit for support, because they seem to be trained in being infuriating, and even our lowest tier techs don't deserve that kind of torture. Would I rather talk to an AI when calling Intuit for support? Yes.
However, I could see areas where this would be bad. Insurance carriers would be my perfect example of this - there's a *need* for both human judgment and accountability when dealing with insurance claims. Having each statement from the phone system conclude with a paragraph-long ChatGPT disclaimer would be insufferable, and they'd all amount to "I'm just a chatbot, you need to verify this information with a CSR..." "then let me verify this information with a CSR" "Before you verify this information with a CSR......", it'd easily devolve into being unproductive...but if 'fool the AI' is the name of the game, some enterprising troublemakers will get the phone system to agree to do some massive payout, which will then make it even more impossible for end users to get their claims sorted properly.
Ultimately, there are indeed places where an AI system can be helpful in a phone system. If the goal is for it to be helpful, I do think it can be. However, if the phone system is intended to be a barrier to customer service, rather than an enabler of it, AI will look great this quarter, and terrible every quarter.
Of course, things will get *really* interesting when an enterprising developer with a grudge and a GPU cluster gets so pissed that he writes his own AI who can call customer service with the express intent of doing what he wants...six hours over the phone and ultimately finding an exploit? Sounds like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object...
So in other words: (Score:2)
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I would have moderated you FUNNY, if it had not actually been sad and dystopian.
Adorable! (Score:2)
What about Amazon? Microsoft? What company do you want me to pick? AI Chat bots are
A Misleading Title (Score:2)
I've been building call centers (we actually call them 'contact centers' these days) based on Twilio and Amazon Connect for large corporate clients for the last 4+ years. I don't think 'Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services' stated the situation correctly. It's not that we'll have a "...'minimal' need for call centres in as soon as a year...". Instead, we'll be reducing the number of contact center agents needed to run a contact center by using AI.
But there's alot more to a contact center that the
Re: (Score:3)
The only call center software I see as a customer is simply designed to make me give up.
Call Centers now use Voice Mail Jail. (Score:1)
Out of the frying pan... (Score:2)
... into the fire.
We went from knowledgable people on help desks
to people who can read the manual to you
to bots you have to game to get to a person who can read
now on to a bot that will likely stumble or hallucinate before solving the problem
*and even if I'm wrong* and they get as good as current conditions are
or heaven forfend better
we will be the beta testers / machine learning trainers
not AI (Score:2)
It's not AI that will kill off call centers; it's the wanton incompetence of call centers.
It's true (Score:3)
AI vs NS (Score:2)
On top of that, the less intelligent ones will refuse to use the AI support, or will not follow it's instructions correctly and blame the AI.
Long time doing tech support, so it's not just being pessimistic about humanity but my own experience with the ones calling tech support for help.
(Yes, that's not evidence, it's just anecdotal, but it absolutely is my opinion.)
Don't start headlines ... (Score:2)
... with "AI Could Kill" please!
AliExpress already went that way in 2020 (Score:2)
Intelligent IVR's were the solution before, right? (Score:2)
Only thing worse than an offshore call center.. (Score:1)