> The human impact in our sector is too important. A machine cannot, at least not yet, sympathize, joke, and persuade in the right balance, especially when the other party is emotionally agitated.
I'd also add that even the reasoning for why the human isn't replaceable here is debatable. I've never called a call centre for sympathy or jokes. It's always because I have a query I want an answer to or problem I want sorted ASAP.
Assuming the benefit of an AI call centre would be that I wouldn't have to wait on hold, I'd rather have the AI centre than the inefficient human one. In scenarios where an AI can't easily deal with the query, then sure, I see why it would be good to have a sympathetic human who can take the call, but 90% of the time an AI would do just fine.
I think this is what a lot of people get wrong about automation. Everyone likes to point out how their job has these one or two really difficult bits, while missing that 90% of the job is easy.
As an example, here in the UK a lot of cashiers have now been replaced with self-checkouts, despite the fact we're still far from fully automating the cashier's job. We still need a couple of people on hand when there's security tags to remove or when someone needs IDing, etc. But that doesn't change the fact there's far fewer of them because 90% of the job can be automated.