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CEO replaces 90% of support staff with AI, praises the system on Twitter
(www.techspot.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Honestly, support is kinda a good use case for it as long as they don't rely on it to the max. There's always going to be outlier problems. Phone support seems like one of those jobs that is demoralizing to do as a human, so why not strive to remove it?
This is a simplistic view of the scenario, of course.
If my problem could have been solved by a computer, I wouldn't have a problem. If I ever resort to picking up my phone, it's because I need another human to help me.
There are many people who don't troubleshoot like you. Tons of people go straight to direct support contact.
Right, so in that case, you'd eventually get to the 10% remaining support staff.
Unless your computer doesn't have the knowledge base, training, or connections/features necessary to solve your problem. I lost access to my email last week because I forgot to update my nameserver when my provider switched servers. It's not that I didn't know what to do or how to do it, but I couldn't log into my registrar account because it uses an email as a quasi-2FA challenge. I ended up needing a human to send me a 2FA(-ish) code via my on-file phone rather than via email so I could update my MX records. There was no need for me to talk to an actual human to get that alternate method, an AI chat-bot could have performed that function.
Part of the reason it’s demoralizing is that most of the time the poor support people don’t actually have the power to fix the problem that the person on the other end of the line is having. In many cases they’re punished for letting someone cancel service which is why you keep getting passed around until someone takes pity on you and accepts the hit to their metrics. I know sometimes people suck but I think we mostly suck when the systems we operate in make it impossible to lean into our humanity.
One thing that an AI could do better than humans is to actually stay on top of software changes over time. The number of cases where I have been following official documentation, only to find out that the current version doesn't actually work that way is absurd--and it would still be absurd even if it was only 1 (it's not).
Assuming the AI is able to access and understand the source code, it could at least make sure the current methods or variables or whatever match what the code does at any given time. We'd still need humans for other parts of technical documentation, at least for awhile yet, but this part is something that is already much better handled by a computer.