2y ago

CEO lays off 23 of 26 of support staff in favor of AI

www.businessinsider.com

An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff after an AI chatbot outperformed them

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1062067

In similar case, US National Eating Disorder Association laid off entire helpline staff. Soon after, chatbot disabled for giving out harmful information.

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2y ago

An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff, after an AI chatbot outperformed them

www.businessinsider.com /ai-chatbot-ceo-laid-off-staff-human-support-2023-7

20 comments

Yet another example of how capitalism uses computers backwards.
"AI is taking our jobs" - Suumit Shah, the CEO of the e-commerce platform Dukaan, who laid off 90% of his support staff, replacing them with an AI chatbot.
It's a little annoying how this article is written as a shitty "look who's getting dunked on on Twitter today" article, even though it's actually about a serious issue. I don't care about Twitter drama, I care about the fact that people are losing their jobs to AI.
- Because they can’t or are not willing to investigate what happened at this particular company nor to its staff. The push of the story is therefore about what’s happening on Twitter (“getting absolutely roasted”) because people connect with action.
  A better story could recount the events up to now. Maybe something like this?
  Find some fired staff members. How long were they working there?
  Tell a little story of the day the staff first heard of the layoffs.
  Show the layoff message or paraphrase what was said to them by CEO or whoever
  Interesting point: Were they told they were being replaced by a large language model or some "AI" tech?
  Now include the obnoxious tweet by the CEO
  Finding this information and weaving it into a story that people go "And then what happened?!" is difficult and takes time. It's hard to justify when you can get clicks from shit like this article.
I’m sure it still costs less than the CEOs salary.
- Replace the CEO with a chatbot
  
  This was actually discussed a few months back
  https://futurism.com/the-byte/replacing-ceos-with-ai-makes-sense
  
  Seriously… I don’t think I have ever had a CEO say anything that didn’t make me think they are a robot in a skin suit.
  
  Guess time will tell if it would have been smarter to replace the CEO with the chat bot instead.
Why keep the 3 staff? They're not going to be working diligently to do all the human tasks while freshly aware of how little they're valued at this point. They're going to look for a better place to work.
This is now the trick for firing expensive staff
- All those pesky staff, costing me money to produce value.
CEO's are always leading with short-term gains. Chat bots and AI are only going to be as good as their learning models, which also have to include (in this specific case for customer service) learning through recorded interactions with people. As technology changes, without humans actually answering phones and troubleshooting real-time, the AI will be left to original equipment manuals (OEM) for guidance, and any FAQ's that may (or may not) exist).
OEM's only cover a limited range of issues. Long-term consequences are that AI won't be able to properly direct future customers because they lack the nuance of human to human interaction as tech and social norms change. Imagine talking to an AI that learned all it's interaction with humans back in 1960.

20 comments