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
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Suumit Shah, the CEO of Bengaluru-based Dukaan, said the chatbot answered customer queries in 2 minutes — a task that took the humans over 2 hours.

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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62Y

I’m sure it still costs less than the CEOs salary.

xuxebiko
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212Y

Replace the CEO with a chatbot

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52Y

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.

cassetti
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72Y

This was actually discussed a few months back

https://futurism.com/the-byte/replacing-ceos-with-ai-makes-sense

LostCause
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2Y

Guess time will tell if it would have been smarter to replace the CEO with the chat bot instead.

xuxebiko
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2Y

Based on my experience with CEOs, The pretend-CEO is not psycopathic enough to be a CEO.

LostCause
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12Y

Yea especially the Bing chatbot is too cute for a job like this, it also added a 😅 later on in our little chat, though maybe the CEO should have taken some advice from it in this case.

xuxebiko
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142Y

“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.

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42Y

This is now the trick for firing expensive staff

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32Y

All those pesky staff, costing me money to produce value.

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162Y

Yet another example of how capitalism uses computers backwards.

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102Y

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.

Oliver Lowe
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21Y

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?

  1. Find some fired staff members. How long were they working there?
  2. Tell a little story of the day the staff first heard of the layoffs.
  3. Show the layoff message or paraphrase what was said to them by CEO or whoever
  4. Interesting point: Were they told they were being replaced by a large language model or some “AI” tech?
  5. 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.

quirzle
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52Y

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.

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.

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