We'd probably be better off replacing 90% of CEOs with AI.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Or just one of those magic 8 balls to make decisions
So we are still replacing 90% of them then?
No, apparently just one of the 8-balls :(
Remember the magic meatball episode of Rocko's modern life?
Only if the money that would have paid the CEO went back to the workers... But I think we all know it would go to the board and shareholders.
Does that mean we're going to start holding CEOs accountable?
We can only hope.
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This was always going to happen. As is the revolution that will eventually overthrow them. Capitalism isn’t built for sustainability.
I feel like this is a growing sentiment everywhere I look these days. We used to get shunned for saying it and here you are getting upvoted. I guess it becomes more obvious.
I think due to our federated nature here we likely have a bit of an echo chamber effect where we are more likely to agree with each other. For starters you’re more likely to be using Lemmy if you understand tech.
Sharing these same thoughts on pretty much any platform with more active users, and I expect we’d see a lot of blood thirsty capitalists poor into the comments.
Even on Reddit, I noticed the overall sentiment towards capitalism shifting over the last decade or so. Subs like a boring dystopia and late stage capitalism were popular and, though there would often be supporters of capitalism chiming in, their numbers have dwindled.
So while I do think you're right about there being a stronger bias here, that bias seems to be getting stronger everywhere.
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- Time to first response
- Resolution time
- Customer support costs
It's key to note that customer satisfaction with response is not among the metrics the CEO is highlighting. It seems that the role of customer support is increasingly to frustrate customers away from pursuing issues, rather than reaching a mutually-satisfying resolution. I consider most customer support chatbots as a tactic towards that: they're not going to offer any significant assistance and exist simply to waste my time, so of course the imaginary "time to resolution" is going to be minimal. If they're going to make it a hassle then I'll just open up a credit card dispute.
Pretty easy to see that this will lead to immediate short-term gains but long-term pain. I can't tell you the amount of infinite loops I've found myself in with AI chat, even among the most simplistic questions.
Hell, I've caught myself in some of those infinite loops with actual people.
Seriously. Worked in support call center before. Support staff and already running on scripts. I bet the CEO is probably right to have made those cuts. We should be seeing AI tools as another clear indication of the need for UBI, not desperately clinging to terrible jobs for human drudgery sake.
Yes! Support through call centers has been notoriously hard to get right. It requires a lot of employees, it is really hard to scale with demand and it can push customers away if it is not working well. And on top of this, the people working in them are among the least satisfied employees.
If this can be automated away somehow, everyone wins.
I love people cosplaying as CEOs who clearly love being called a CEO. In reality, they have a product that’s likely a clone of an existing better product and barely have any employees.
... there's no way their tech is good enough to avoid the billion and one ways to manipulate and confuse current-gen LLMs...
Unless he went with older tech, just feeding specific pre-programmed responses to specific keywords. That's a glorified phone tree though, nothing really new.
There’s an in between. Have the LLM map into predefined responses, thus leveraging the LLM’s insane parsing abilities with the linearity of tree-like structures.
It can be done, and can be done intelligently.
Which I somewhat doubt was the case here.
At that point it’s probably cheaper to purchase support staff in SEA or Eastern Europe… staffing a software product team with ML and prompt engineers for a bespoke support solution is costly.
Granted they probably went with a vendor, but that model has its own costly drawbacks.
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%
No mention of what happened to customer satisfaction. But given how low it already was with their human support he clearly didn't give a shit about that to begin with. I, too, give very quickly when I realize I'm chatting with a bot.
CEO, this year: Balance sheets look great! labor costs way down!
CEO, years out: Looks like profits are going down as people realize our products are shit., Better fire more people. Maybe I'll sell off some assets too!
repeat until bankrupt
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Side rant, but do you ever call in to support with a serious problem and they just by default treat you like a granny who doesnt know how to type in a wifi password? That whole process is so frustrating, and they never have the expertise to handle more sophisticated problems.
As someone who works in Level 2 and 3 Tech, the majority of people who do contact me are actual morons who legitimately think turning off and on their monitor is akin to rebooting their PC. I know that has been memed to death, but it's true. I've legitimately had to make a whole presentation on the various ways to restart a computer and present it to a group of about 20 people.
I have so many stories to the point where, if I don't treat everyone like it's their first time touching a computer, it will lead to the user getting pissed off because I didn't tell them that they had to left click on their mouse because they're so used to their phone being touch screen that they assumed that every screen was.
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as a former tech support person I think the reason why its usually like that is that most of the people who call in are people don't know how to use a computer at least it was for the company I worked at
True for most doesn't mean true for everyone and not being able to switch once it is clear the person does know how to use the computer is really annoying.
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Understandable when most people wouldn't have expertise. The real annoying thing is when you use live chat/email support and list everything you've tried and what you think the root of the problem is. Then they start the basic shit again, when you've already told them you have tried it all.
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If I had to guess it will go poorly. Having tried to use ChatGPT for parts of my job, it gets a lot subtly wrong. If I had just let it do my job, it would make a mess.
My job falls under IS, and in our monthly townhall we had a brief from the head of technology on our companies AI policy.
Our policy states we can only use approved AI systems, not sure which one but we have an account with one of the big ones. The main thing was, absolutely 100% of everything generated has to be reviewed and approved by a person before being used.
Basically any person using it will be on the hook as if they had created it themselves. They encouraged us to use it and explore where it can help, but made sure we knew we'd be responsible for the results.
Personally, I'd love to play around with it, as I do both graphics and programming as part of my job. The only issue I have is the language is so niche I doubt it'll have enough data to generate anything, and I don't want to feed proprietary code into an unsecured database to train it.
I'm sure in the next two years I'll be using it for something.
I hate AI as it is now. I really do.
Why do you hate AI instead of hating business schools culture? AI will save lives, ceos use it to fire people
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Greed is the problem. Not AI.
It’s not just AI. Somewhere between the “research” and “commercialisation” phase of every technology’s development it seems to transform into the most cynical, exploitative possible version of itself.
Love when the AI assures me over and over that it can take context into account, and then it forgets the context in the same message as my request. Literally the same message. I separated the context and request with only a newline, and it forgot the context and gave me generic AI BS.
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.
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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.
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and doesn't receive any wages or sick leave, obviously.
Well, not exactly, but these AI response systems are not cheap to run, you either:
A: Need to use a third party which charges you a non-trivial amount of money per response
B: Host it yourself on the cloud, which charges you a non-trivial amount of money for computation costs
C: Host it yourself bare metal, which costs a VERY non-trivial amount of front for hardware and still costs you a nontrivial (but lower amount) monthly for electricity/maint
But yeah no... they are a shit tonne cheaper than people though. So it is that the horse is being replaced by the streetcar.
Future life hack: How to prompt-inject AI support chats to give you refunds and free gifts.
Support Staff costs money. When they do their job right, they cost more money (refunds, repairs, etc...) . They don't make money. The only reason support even exists is to keep the PR around the company good. If a company is small enough (or it is soon to be non-existent), it could just get rid of support and just hire a good PR firm and no one would know the difference.
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If like to see how long this company still exists. I don't think the technology is even remotely ready to really do this kind of thing.
I'm sure this will go well for them and even better for their customers.
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