Employees’ worst nightmare of being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived much sooner than expected.
Dukaan CEO Suumit Shah is under attack online after he announced on Twitter that he replaced 90 per cent of his customer support team with an AI chatbot.
Dukaan is a Bengaluru-based e-commerce startup that helps businesses set up their online shopfronts.
Mr Shah revealed on July 11 that he decided to prioritise prompt customer service and profitability over everything else, reported the Economic Times. He wrote that the use of AI tools reduced wait time from 1 min, 44sec to instantaneous and customer support costs by 85 per cent.
“We had to lay off 90 per cent of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,” tweeted the 31-year-old who also mentioned how his team developed an AI chatbot named Lina, which generated instant answers to customer queries and customised answers for clients.
In one sweep, he claimed, Dukaan was able to remove communication bottlenecks such as delayed, generic responses, and cut down costs. “About 200 live chats and 1,400 support tickets have been marked as resolved by Lina,” he said.
Mr Shah told Insider the the layoffs occurred last September and resulted in Duukan — which currently employs 60 people — letting go of 23 of the 26 members of its customer support team. He said his “monthly budget” for customer support is now only US$100 ($132).
The tweet amassed two million views and more than 2,500 likes within two days. But it also triggered outrage across the Internet.
Netizens felt that Mr Shah was using AI as a smokescreen to hide shortcomings like poor performance and lack of funding.
“Note to all young, starry-eyed, startup folk. Make no mistake. The support team was laid off here because business is failing and funding is dry. Not because of AI,” netizen Adityarao tweeted.
Another netizen wrote: “Why are some Indian tech founders so heartless and insensitive to human impact? An employee is not just a machine to fulfil objectives and key results. Disgusting.”
On LinkedIn, a humour page called Corporate Bhakt shared the news of the layoff. Some LinkedIn users joked that CEOs may also be replaced by AI while others pointed out that the human element of customer service can never be replaced completely by AI.
“I’m in the customer support industry for eight years and trust me, no AI can replace a human in customer-handling. Wonder if Dukaan go down soon,” commented a LinkedIn user.
Responding to the online backlash, Mr Shah told Insider that he regretted kicking off a conversation about layoffs on Twitter but was adamant that his point still stands. “AI is taking our jobs. Over time, everybody will start doing this. It’s not just us. Maybe I’m just too straightforward to have put it on Twitter.”
Dukaan is not the first company to announce layoffs as a result of AI – a trend which is likely to continue, according to a May report by human resources firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
In May, Insider reported similar outrage when the US National Eating Disorder Association laid off its entire helpline staff and replaced them with a chatbot. Soon after, the chatbot was disabled for giving out harmful information on eating disorders.
In March, Goldman Sachs published a report showing that AI could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. In India, several firms are investing into AI to develop products, and it has sparked concerns about job losses.
Indo-Asian News Service
