After letting AI replace human work for 3 months, the company’s CEO praised: “The copy-paste work has completely disappeared!”

Original source: CSDN

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

Since the AI boom began at the end of last year, the discussion about "whether AI will replace human jobs" has never stopped. In March this year, the investment bank Goldman Sachs even released a report: With the breakthrough of AI technology, it is expected that 300 million jobs worldwide will be replaced by generative AI.

This prediction seems to be confirmed. Since then, many companies in the industry have actively embraced AIGC and at the same time chosen to replace some positions with AI:

• Huang Yimeng, founder of Xindong Network, once revealed that he learned that due to the rapid development of AI drawing tools, some game teams have cut off their original painting outsourcing teams.
• BlueFocus announced in April this year that it would stop outsourcing copywriting and switch to AI, and its stock price even soared 18% as a result.
• Indian e-commerce startup Dukaan announced in July that it decided to lay off 90% of its customer support team and "outsource" this part of the work to AI chatbots.

I believe many people are curious: "What are the first companies that used AI to replace human jobs, what are they doing now?" - In July this year, it announced that it would replace 90% of its support staff with AI, which attracted massive criticism. Latest response from Dukaan CEO Suumit Shah: Well, the copy-paste job is completely gone.

The announcement that AI will replace humans has attracted a lot of criticism

According to Suumit Shah himself, he has always been dissatisfied with the company's customer service team, believing that their answers to customers are always general and unfocused, and they often appear helpless when encountering difficult problems.

With the popularity of ChatGPT last year, he saw that it could answer questions in a complex and realistic way, so he thought that maybe ChatGPT could solve the Dukaan customer service hotline problem that he was not satisfied with: creating an internal customer service chatbot for Dukaan based on ChatGPT. Lina.

After having an initial idea, Suumit Shah assigned the task to Ojasvi Yadav, Dukaan's AI/ML leader, who trained the chatbot mainly based on content from the company's help center.

By December 2022, Lina, the customer service chatbot powered by ChatGPT, was largely completed, so Suumit Shah tried to let Lina process almost all the information - as a result, he found that the company's customers were basically satisfied with Lina's answers.

Therefore, although Suumit Shah announced the layoffs in July this year, in fact Dukaan had laid off 27 customer service staff as of June. Not only that, Suumit Shah also shared the remarkable results that Dukaan achieved after he let AI take over human customer service work:

(1) The first response time is shortened from 1 minute and 44 seconds to immediate response!

(2) The solution time was shortened from 2 hours and 13 minutes to 3 minutes and 12 seconds!

(3) The overall cost of customer support is reduced by about 85%!

Obviously, Suumit Shah was very excited and proud of the decision to let AI take over 90% of customer service work. For this reason, he shared the entire process in a post on With an idea and the right team, anyone can turn their entrepreneurial dreams into a reality, even overnight!”

However, unlike Suumit Shah's excitement, most netizens' comments under the tweet at that time were accusatory and critical:

• "Layoffs are never a pleasant thing, so why should you be proud of it?"
• “Not only have you disrupted the lives of 90% of your customer service team, but you’re celebrating it in public and may have even undermined the quality of your customer support.”
• "Make no mistake, you are laying off your support team just because the business is failing and funding is drying up, not because of AI."

"Copy and paste work, 100% disappeared"

After receiving countless abuses and condemnations on the Internet, Suumit Shah admitted in a recent interview that he regretted posting about layoffs on X, but he still insisted on replacing the customer service team with AI.

“The reality is that AI is taking our jobs, and over time, everyone will start doing it, not just us. Maybe I’m being too blunt and put this on the map. I’m here to tell you.”

According to Suumit Shah, the company initially laid off 23 of the 26 members of the customer support team, and after the layoffs, the company’s customer support budget was reduced to $100 per month: “For me, replacing the entire team with AI robots It’s a no-brainer. The bot is 100 times smarter than me, can handle issues on the fly, and the money I spend on the bot is 100 times what I used to pay my customer support team.”

However, Suumit Shah added that not every customer service staff has to worry about being replaced by AI. Most of the customer service staff he laid off were those who could only copy and paste responses: “This kind of job (copy-paste job) is gone forever. It's gone, 100% gone."

Although it has received a lot of infamy, Suumit Shah said that Dukaan's business has also grown since July: Dukaan's customer service team is now much streamlined, but its efficiency is much higher than in the past. As for the funds that originally belonged to the customer service team budget, and the company has reallocated these funds to drive innovation and expansion.

A large number of jobs may be cannibalized

But similar to July this year, Suumit Shah's satisfied attitude towards AI replacing human jobs has actually aroused more people's concerns.

Sharad Sharma, co-founder of the iSPIRT Foundation, an Indian non-profit technology think tank, speculated: "You will...eventually see a lot of jobs being cannibalized. The remaining jobs will be fewer and fewer, and they will be different types of jobs."

Take countries such as India and the Philippines as examples. These countries have undertaken a lot of "call center" outsourcing business, and millions of well-educated, English-speaking people are making a living in positions such as customer service, information technology, and data processing. However, the emergence of AI automation may have a profound impact on the global economy:

• For example, Western companies employed just a few thousand people in the Philippines at the beginning of this century, while that number has ballooned to more than 1.6 million by 2023, according to industry analysts. But a study by Oxford Economics and Cisco estimates that digital automation will eliminate 1.1 million jobs in the Philippines by 2028.
• In addition, outsourcing work in India currently accounts for nearly 10% of the country's GDP. But in April this year, Bloomberg predicted: "If the technology supporting ChatGPT replaces software engineers, the country most affected will be India, which has more than 5 million programmers."

Based on this, many experts believe that applying AI to business as soon as possible to retain these jobs may be a way these countries can consider.

But at the same time, Virginia L. Doellgast, professor of labor relations at Cornell University, also pointed out its disadvantages: the addition of AI will make the job more difficult - simple customer service issues will be handled by AI chatbots, and more complex issues will be left to Human processing.

That is, employees will be working on tasks that are more difficult and take longer to solve. If the salary is linked to specific indicators, such as call volume, etc., then when employees handle such more difficult tasks, their salary benefits will actually be reduced.

So, what do you think about using AI to replace human jobs?

Reference links: