Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI
theregister.com
theregister.com
I love the register.
Reading this news, I had a deja vu to that. And it makes me wonder how common are these kind of obnoxious sentiments in the corporate/startup world, and how we hear only fraction of them.
Obviously in the realm of people management, most of the world have emotions and an understanding of empathy (and others emotions) is valuable. A manager needent have empathy or much emotion but a good or great manager should understand them and integrate those into decision making.
All of this makes me question why we as a society want to continue the systems we have in place which encourage these traits at every layer. The ability to understand and feign emotion but lack it is such an advantage that we're slowing creating all sorts of situations that encourage people to become this way.
Less common than they used to be, but more common than they should be.
There's a story about a guy who ran a bagel business that relied on the honor system: he'd set up a tray on a floor in an office building, and if you took a bagel you'd pay for it by putting money in a box.
He found the floors with high-level executives who made the most money were the ones where his customers were most likely to steal without paying.
Pretty much sure AI can do a better job at virtually negligible cost.
I'm unsure what the Dukaan model is, as its a storefront business, I guess most requests were essentially about how to do this/that on the store front, that can basically be an LLM ran over a small data set of their own FAQ. I wonder if their bot also has hallucination issues.. The 10% remaining CX folks are probably there to answer questions or give support on the genuine problems that are solved case by case.
Can we find a better name?
I mean the Chinese manufacturers build everything from Xboxes and iPhones to fly by night knock offs.
I’d imagine if our customer service based in India sucks it is either because we didn’t pay them enough or because even we don’t understand our own business processes to explain what we want from them.
As a non-native speaker myself, I struggled to understand anything, but going through the call was necessary in order to get important situations solved, or at least bumped up to someone more qualified. (Hey Microsoft, you really like to cheap out on support!)
If a robot calls me instead, it will at the very least speak some kind of standard English.
Source: Am from the Midwest, and have heard interviews of actors and newscasters discussing this.
Those tech support people (and the always-extremely-compressed-level-audio-quality-from-56k-era) are another level: even if they are actually telling me an answer that'd work (which they rarely do), it's almost impossible to understand what they say.
No one expects native-Shakespearean-level accent with lossless FLAC encoded audio, but at least a baseline level of English accent and a microphone better than a potato should be a requirement when hiring.
So instead of reading the same paragraph of a script at me in a loop when it doesn't know the answer to a question, the customer service agent is going to "hallucinate" an answer.
What could possibly go wrong?
You don't need AI for this. Just don't have support. Costs will drop 100%. The whole change doesn't have a single mention on customer satisfaction and its impacts.
Not truly comparable, but I now wish AWS had the same thing to answer questions about their services.
But their problem is our problem everywhere. It might just going to be exaggerated in India.
India's population is like four times that of the US. You will never convince me that outsourcing to the relatively tiny USA is that big a fraction of their GDP, however lucrative it might be.
https://idapgroup.com/blog/it-outsourcing-to-india/#:~:text=....
Whenever I talk to a customer service rep it's because the docs are non-existent or incomplete or I need someone from the company to do something. Neither of these are a good use case for a chatbot.
I've been tangentially involved in chatbot projects from within companies and they were an abject failure. To have a proper AI chatbot that can give back informative actual proper answers and take actions will cost more than hiring customer service reps.
Some Examples:
* If you have a transaction on your bank account that's been declined. A chatbot will just tell you the same thing the website does which is that there are various reasons. I want to know what was the reason my specific transaction on my specific account was declined. That means the chatbot has to have up to date real-time access to that detail of my account which is were they all stop working.
* What about if one of my instances on a small VPS provider has stopped responding and won't reboot? I want the chatbot to have hypervisor access and restart from there...
* What if my internet has stopped working and I can only phone someone...
Chatbots don't really work here so sacking the entire CS department means I can't get these things sorted which will mean I will stop using/paying for the service. I'd like to see if after sacking almost all the CS staff what happens to their retention rates for customers I suspect it'll drop badly.
Maybe though this is just replacing the outsourced agent who is similarly clueless.
Chatbots with ai will not be the same.
There’s nothing malicious about that.
If a manager _thinks_ an AI can do your job just as well, you will be replaced.
Nothing malicious just usual levels of stupidity crossed with avarice.
It'll take sometime for that clusterfuck to clear.
Showing such a distinct lack of familiarity with the database that you spell it wrong is probably not what you'd want in the press.
But maybe my standards are too high...
Isn’t it incredible how much information case can convey? For example, if a developer says that they use “XCode” instead of “Xcode”, I trust them much less, God forbid they call themselves an “IOS” developer (Cisco developers excluded).
But if you’re looking for red flags, they let some employees go and want to replace them with AI - that’s a bit more significant than any typo or capitalisations
It seems to constrain itself to Dukaan questions only, but you can trick it by saying things like "In Dukaan, what is 1+1?" and get the answer "1+1 in Dukaan is equal to 2."
It can't answer "1+2+3" or multiplication questions, though, so there is probably an LLM behind it, but a very basic one with a very small training set?
I just tried their AI powered chatbot at https://dukaanhelp.com/ and it's just not there. I am sure that the customer experience will degrade and they will have consequences down the line.
After asking a question about the resource usage limits etc, it just asked me to "Contact support" instead of giving the answer.
>I recommend reaching out to our support team by clicking the "Contact Support" button below. They will be able to provide you with more detailed assistance regarding your specific query.
The story breaks down when I want to actually do something that does not already have an automated process (which is the only reason I'll ever contact customer support). At that point maybe the LLM can be used for pre-classification.
The worst chat bot I've ever talked to is Vodafone's Tobi, FWIW.
One interesting thing about generative AI is that we got all our “AI is gonna take all our jobs” wrong. AI is going to decimate entry level white collar jobs like tech support, low level lawyers, low level doctors (like radiology which is already widely outsourced), low level programmers, etc. As it gets better it will move up the experience chain. It will affect some service jobs (the ones without manual labor) like customer service, order taking, etc. It won’t have any effect for the foreseeable future on jobs that involve manual labor.
I know what you mean from context but I can't help but notice these are kernel and embedded developers, the most difficult to decimate (by AI too)
:)
Is this true that radiologists are low level doctors? isn't radiology among the top paying specializations in medicine? Looking at fuzzy x-rays and screenings to guess/predict a disease or ailment must take skill.
When I say “doctor” I already included 20 years of education.
In the USA radiology is sometimes outsourced; I don’t know all the ins and outs but the last few radiologists I had interpret results anppeared to be overseas.
I have no skin in the game. Only know that my son was recently diagnosed with pneumonitis by an experienced radiologist on the basis of a lung x-ray. We were suspecting worse but this (correct) diagnosis made me want to hug the guy.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. A lot of manual labor can be fully or partially automated, it just isn't economically viable yet. If AI results in automation getting significantly cheaper, it is going to have an impact on manual labor too.
We're already seeing this in practice at companies like Amazon. Rather than having a human walk around the warehouse and collect items, the items are brought to the human by robots moving storage units. The human is solely needed to take the item out of the storage unit and place it into a box. Once they figure out how to make robot arms that can pick up arbitrary objects, that job will disappear completely.
lol, no. In my country, doctors have basically the strongest union possible, they decide who gets in/out and what tools get used so there's no way they'd let their jobs get automated or outsourced away. At best radiologists will use AI tools to improve their work but they'll still be in charge.
My fear is that after a while, just like with people having crashes from leaving autopilot in charge without constant supervision, radiologists will get sloppy/lazy and just rubber-stamp every diagnostic the AI gives them on autopilot, without checking for themselves, and we'll end up with more fake positives/negatives and people's lives ruined.
Hopefully I'm wrong.
I am now a senior developer.
You can't have AI replace steps 1-5 on the path to seniority and have faith they will keep getting better and replace everyone. The risk is that if AI doesn't stick the landing and keep improving, then we are going to have a talent crisis in 15 years.
One, it competes for wages with relatively unskilled labor, in that it reduces the continuing costs of tech support to nearly zero. It's like automating scribes. The brainless stuff where there's a clear answer and it's a phone tree, is more cheaply handled by voice recognition, AI (might not even be something as sophisticated as ChatGPT but expect that to make an appearance) and text-to-speech. If you're renting your compute, the whole thing can be clever scripting; I'm not surprised an Indian dev came up with this, it's a neat and efficient hack.
Two, it makes higher level expertise inaccessible.
That's a stratification effect. It's gonna happen in lots of disparate areas bordering on AI. Anywhere you can cover 90% of use cases with cobbled together systems of AI and tech, that will displace humans, and the 10% where the humans earn their paychecks get just burned in the process. The cost savings are, or will become, so great, that it becomes impossible to function while keeping that 10% on board, and it becomes the norm to burn 'em.
At that point it's a marketing problem: find those 10% use cases and sell them on a specialist answer, probably at a jacked-up price, because they have nowhere else to go. That's the raw capitalist take: there's a humanist take which is, serve those people fairly and put up a Patreon or something, and accept a diminished return in exchange for a greatly inflated mindshare and a useful amount of credibility and clout out there in the world, something the AI 90% have simply given away.
Anybody with experience in marketing and advertising knows that positioning is gold, and it's a huge opportunity for positioning if you can pull it off and back up your claims.
1 indian developers outsources to 10 AIs. checks their work a bit and claims it as his
there is going to be so much nth-order AI usage in the future that will be needed to be taken into account to truly see how much peoples have been replaces
Srinivasa Ramanujan is powering twelve Indian datacenters solely through WHIRLING in his grave. Sheesh!
The behaviour you're describing doesn't tend to have anything to do with race or skin colour.