AI is being used across most business functions, but one of its most effective use-cases appears to be in automating customer support.
Microsoft has said that it has saved $500 million by using AI in its call-centers. The company said that AI tools were helping it boost productivity in areas such as sales and customer service. Microsoft’s COO Judson Althof said that even as Microsoft saved $500 million using AI, it did so while managing to increase both employee and customer satisfaction.
Althoff stressed to employees that Al could make them more effective as sellers, with each salesperson finding more leads, closing deals quicker and generating 9% more revenue through the use of Microsoft’s Copilot Al assistant.
Microsoft’s updates abouts its savings from AI come at a time when the company is laying off large numbers of people. In May this year, Microsoft had said that it was laying off 3 percent of its workforce. The company had 228,000 employees, which meant that the layoff had impacted nearly 7,000 employees. Two years prior, Microsoft had laid off 10,000 employees.
While Microsoft hasn’t explicitly said that these layoffs were because of gains from AI, other companies have been a lot more forthcoming. Just last month, Amazon had said that it expects its corporate workforce to shrink over the next few years because of the increased use of AI in its operations. “In the next few years, we expect (to) reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had told employees in an email.
Apart from Microsoft, other companies too seem to have found AI to be useful in automating customer support. Klarna had said last year that its AI assistant was doing the job of 700 human employees, and was even doing their job better than them. Fintech startup Klarna said that its bot built using ChatGPT was more accurate than humans in errand resolution, which led to a 25% drop in repeat enquiries. Also, the AI agent was faster — customers were able to resolve errands in less than 2 minutes as opposed to 11 minutes earlier with human agents. And with a larger company now too seeing similar gains from AI, it does appear that AI use could end up disrupting the customer support function of companies large and small in the coming years.