It’s not even been two years since ChatGPT was launched, but AI is already beginning to impact real-world jobs in India.
Indian e-commerce portal Meesho has said that it has managed to bring down service call costs by 75 percent by replacing human support agents with AI bots. In addition, Meesho claimed that it saw a 10 percent increase in customer satisfaction scores when the humans were replaced with AI. Meesho said that its customer support executives were being upskilled, and were being accommodated in other roles as their jobs are now being done by robots.
“We have seen customer satisfaction scores improve by 10 percent from earlier,” Meesho CTO Sanjeev Barnwal said. The voice bot is currently handling 60,000 calls per day, less than half of Meesho’s daily volume. “While we have a human layer when the customer’s queries are not resolved with the help of a voice bot, our plan is to scale the offering and service all queries through a voice bot at a later point in time,” Barnwal added. He said that replacing humans with robots had also halved the turnaround time for each query from 3-4 minutes to about 1.5-2 minutes.
Meesho has begun upskilling its existing customer care executives in tasks like cataloging in order to keep them within the company. By efficiently handling routine queries, the bot frees up human agents time to focus on more complex issues, further enhancing service quality and optimizing overall support efficiency, Meesho said.
Meesho isn’t the first company that’s looked to outsource human customer-support roles to AI. In March this year, Swedish fintech company Klarna had said that its AI assistant was alone doing the work of 700 human customer support executives. In India, e-commerce tech company Dukaan had claimed that it had fired 90 percent of its support staff after replacing them with AI.
But while Meesho seems to be moving its customer support teams into roles like cataloging, it remains to be seen for long such jobs remain outside the purview of being disrupted by AI. The latest models from OpenAI and other companies are multimodal, and can recognize both text and images. They also seem to have a solid grasp on how the world functions, and tasks like cataloging might soon become cheaper and more efficient to be done by computers. And this isn’t only true for roles like customer support and cataloging — AI is becoming increasingly good at coding, writing legal briefs, and even diagnosing illnesses. And while AI is already making a dent in how companies manage customer support, it might not be long before it looks to disrupt most white-collar jobs that are currently being done by human workers.