Imagine a customer service center that can speak your language, irrespective of what it is.
Alorica, a company in Irvine, California, which runs customer-service centers globally, has launched an artificial intelligence translation tool that enables its representatives to talk with users who speak at least 200 different languages and 75 dialects.
Interestingly, an Alorica representative speaking, for example, Spanish can float a complaint about a balky printer or some other issue from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica would not need to hire a representative who speaks Cantonese.
This is the power of AI. It might be considered a threat: maybe since firms will not need many employees, and will eventually cut some jobs. If chatbots can handle most of the workload, companies will lay off many employees. However, Alorica is hiring aggressively.
The Alorica experience, also seen in many other companies, indicates that AI will not be the job killer that most people fear.
Instead, the groundbreaking technology might be more like the previous breakthroughs – electricity, the steam engine, and the internet: they eliminate some jobs but create many others. This might make workers more productive, to the ultimate benefit of themselves, their staff, and the economy.
According to Nick Bunker, a leading economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, AI will impact many jobs, maybe every job indirectly. But, he does not believe it will result in mass unemployment. He added:
“We have seen other big technological events in our history, and those didn’t lead to a large rise in unemployment. Technology destroys but also creates. There will be new jobs that come about.’’
The AI Revolution
Artificial intelligence empowers machines to perform various tasks previously believed to need human intelligence. The technology has existed for decades, having emerged with an advanced problem-solving computer program, the Logic Theorist, designed in the 1950s at what is now Carnegie Mellon University.
Recently, think of voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. Or IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, which managed to beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
AI burst into the public scene in 2022 when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that can write computer code, conduct conversations, craft essays, compose music, and supply unlimited information channels.
The entry of generative AI has increased fears that chatbots will replace editors, freelance writers, telemarketers, coders, paralegals, customer service reps, and many others. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, commented:
“AI is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs, and this is going to change the way that a lot of current jobs function.’’
The mass assumption that AI chatbots will replace service workers, just like physical robots replaced many factory and warehouse jobs, is yet to become a reality in any widespread manner. And it might never happen.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers stated in August 2024 that it discovered “little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.’’ Advisers said that history highlights that technology normally makes firms highly productive, accelerating economic growth, and creating new kinds of jobs in strange manners.
They referred to a study in 2024 led by David Autor, a top MIT economist: It stated that 60% of the jobs Americans held in 2018 never existed in 1940, having been created by different technologies that emerged later.
Other analysts believe there is not enough evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI. It might come in the future but for now, it has never happened.
Some Jobs Are Vulnerable To AI
The fear that AI poses a massive threat to some job categories is not baseless. For instance, Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur, caused an uproar in 2023 when he boasted that he replaced 90% of his customer support employees with a chatbot called Lina.
This move at Shah’s firm, Dukaan, which helps clients set up e-commerce sites, reduced the response time to inquiries from minutes to almost ‘instant.’ Also, it cut the normal time required to resolve issues from over two hours to around three minutes. Shah stated by email:
“It’s all about AI’s ability to handle complex queries with precision.’’
The cost of offering customer support dropped by 85%. Dukaan expanded its use of AI solutions to sales and analytics and these tools keep growing more powerful.
Shah said:
“It’s like upgrading from a Corolla to a Tesla. What used to take hours now takes minutes. And the accuracy is on a whole new level.’’
Also, researchers at the German Institute for Economic Research, Harvard Business School, and London’s Imperial College Business School published in a study in 2023 that job postings for coders, writers, and artists dropped massively within eight months after the arrival of ChatGPT.
AI Can Complement Human Workers in the Workplace
A 2023 joint study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and New York University published that teachers of English and foreign languages and telemarketers have the most exposed jobs to generative AI and ChatGPT-like language models. However, being exposed to AI does not mean losing your job to the tool. AI can do the tedious work and free up human workers to do other creative tasks.
For instance, the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA, launched a customer-service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries. Instead of sacking workers, it retained 8,500 customer service workers to work on other tasks like advising users on interior design and sorting out complex customer calls.
Chatbots can also enable workers to be highly efficient, complementing their work instead of eliminating it. A study by Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT and Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University tracked 5,200 customer support agents working at a Fortune 500 company that utilized generative AI assistants. The assistant offered important suggestions for handling clients. It also offered links to relevant internal documents.
The agents who used the chatbot were 14% more productive than others who did not. They handled more calls and completed their work faster. The most significant productivity gains of 34% came from the least-skilled and least-experienced workers.
At Alorica, customer service agents use AI to improve their efficiency and speed at work. Within six months, AI helped 850 Alorica reps reduce their average handle time to six minutes, from over eight minutes.
Notably, Alorica is not cutting jobs, it keeps hiring those comfortable with new technology.