The Threat of Generative AIs to Call Centers
It’s no secret that artificial intelligence poses a greater danger to some jobs than to others. This includes call centre employees. While some organisations have already begun using generative AI to replace telecommunication based support professionals, there are concerns that within a year, chatbots may eventually dominate the whole industry.
According to a well-known industry CEO, AI will make call centres scarce in nature. Although there haven’t been any job losses thus far, the CEO continued, that this will change as more global clients use generative AI. It is anticipated to have a significant effect on the customer service centre sector, which employs over 17 million people (Gartner, 2022).
What is the status quo of call centers amidst the inclusion of Generative AI?
The objective is to use technology to the extent that it can anticipate incoming calls and proactively address the customer’s problem, which is why very few call centres get incoming calls at all. Although it may seem far off, it is currently anticipated that chatbots will be able to easily replace humans in a year or so. At the moment, it may seem impossible for a chatbot to meet every request a customer makes over the phone.
Companies have already started using AI to replace call centre employees. 90% of the support staff was let go by a CEO in July of last year, who claimed the action had reduced initial response and resolution times and cut customer support expenses by over 85%. Later, he issued a warning, saying that copy-and-paste jobs would “100%” disappear due to technology.
Since the world will require more workers “in terms of technology talent,” the technology wouldn’t result in a mass loss of jobs. However, most CEOs prefer to promote the idea that the application of Gen AI will provide new job opportunities and that it will help people rather than replace them.
Numerous surveys have estimated how generative AI will affect employment. Two million US jobs are predicted to be replaced by technology by 2030, according to one estimate, and 40% of occupations globally are predicted to be impacted by it, according to the IMF. In what may be the most concerning survey, nearly half of managers said they planned to utilise AI to replace labour and potentially reduce salaries.
According to him, Gen AI is unwaveringly at the forefront of technological advancements, and clients are searching for proofs of concept (POCs) on the efficiencies that Gen AI can provide for application development, application maintenance, and deployment automation.
It will take time for businesses and society to fully reap the benefits of artificial intelligence, and there are still many obstacles to overcome. These include rethinking fundamental business procedures, reskilling and upskilling the workforce, and controlling the dangers associated with Gen AI. business procedures.
Personal Assistants v ChatBots: Generative AI
Nearly everyone makes use of personal assistant technology, such as Siri or Alexa. Although there is occasionally some annoyance regarding the comprehension or appropriateness of our assistants’ responses, personal assistants have become quite popular amongst smartphone and smart home users.
Regarding chatbots, or the automated technology that appears to be managing an increasing number of our encounters with business sales and support systems, we can’t fully say the same.
Businesses understand this, which is why among all AI business applications, chatbots are increasing at the quickest rate. Nearly all businesses say they’re testing them out and that they’ll be using them far more frequently in future sales and support interactions.
Businesses that provide generative AI tools have been striving to expand their own tools to train on company data and to address security issues that come up. The majority of these tools are built on large language models (LLMs) that have been trained on the open Internet, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Conclusion
The combination of individual and support assistant technologies may be the greatest way to recoup the enormous financial investment made in the development of AI technologies. Both users and providers would find value in it.
Since it may eliminate all human costs from support, it’s also the death knell for call centres. The two assistant technologies working together can take them both places that they might not be able to go separately, and that combination is going to happen. All of the repercussions will follow suit.
We must consider what technological tools will be needed for the shift in support from human-driven to AI-assistant-driven, as that is the direction we are going and many influential players already are.
