An Indian CEO is under fire after he said his firm has replaced 90% of support staff with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, writes BBC.
Suumit Shah, founder of Dukaan, an e-commerce firm, tweeted that the chatbot has drastically improved the first response time and resolution of customer queries.
We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot.
Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
The results?
Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT!
Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s
Customer support costs reduced by ~85%Here’s how’s we did it 🧵
— Suumit Shah (@suumitshah) July 10, 2023
The tweet sparked outrage online.
This comes at a time when there has been much talk and fear of AI taking people’s jobs, especially in the service industry.
In a series of tweets, which have more than a million views, Suumit Shah wrote about his company’s decision to use a chatbot. He said that while laying off staff was a “difficult” decision, it was “necessary”.
“Given the state of the economy, start-ups prioritize ‘profitability’ over efforts to become ‘unicorns’, and so do we,” he wrote. He added that customer support has been a struggle for the firm for a long time and that he is looking to fix it.
He also wrote about how they built the robot and AI platform in a short amount of time so that all Dukaan customers can have their own AI assistant. He said the robot answered all kinds of questions with speed and accuracy.
“In the age of instant gratification, starting a business is no longer a distant dream,” he wrote. “With the right idea, with the right team, anyone can turn their entrepreneurial dreams into reality.”
Suumit Shah also added that the firm is hiring for multiple roles.
However, many users criticized his tweets and accused him of disrupting the lives of his employees with this “heartless” decision.
“As expected, I found no mention of the 90% of staff who were made redundant. What assistance have they been given?” asked one user.
“Maybe it was the right decision for the business, but it shouldn’t have turned into a celebration/marketing thing about it,” said another.
Suumit Shah responded to a tweet saying that “as expected, someone is going to feel offended on someone else’s behalf” and added that he would post on LinkedIn about the support given to his staff because on Twitter, people are looking for “profitability and not sympathy”.
In recent years, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have proliferated and become more accessible. There have been accounts of organizations using these tools to increase productivity while reducing costs. This has made workers fear that they will lose their jobs to technology.
In March, Goldman Sachs published a report showing that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. In India, more firms are investing in artificial intelligence to develop products, and this has raised concerns about job losses.
2023-07-12 08:03:26
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