from Hacker News

AI could kill call centres, says Tata Consultancy Services head

by bernardlunn on 4/25/24, 5:50 AM with 6 comments

  • by ggm on 4/25/24, 6:16 AM

    Based on every chatbot I use to resolve corner cases in billing and service delivery, he's on drugs.

    I invite anyone who has had the mythical stellar AI helpdesk experience, the one where the AI uses its discretionary budget to fix that bill, updates the records to make your bill align to the right meter identity, removes the credit line mistake, restores the extra bonus interest, you name it: the only outcome this twonk wants is this one:

      COMPUTER SAYS NO
    
    Let's hear it for agile computer discretionary fixes. Anyone?
  • by bernardlunn on 4/25/24, 5:50 AM

    https://on.ft.com/3Uhznrs

    AI could kill call centres, says Tata Consultancy Services head

    Chatbots will soon take over much of the work of human agents, forecasts chief of Indian IT group

    I read the article to see if TCS was offering more than “we prefer to get paid for high end AI engineering work rather than low end call center work.”

    The more I was looking for was an understanding that paying customers reward good service by buying premium services. We are receptive to an upsell if the company offered a useful service when we called them. Whether the service was delivered by a robot or a human is less interesting to a customer.

    It could be that TCS did not understand this or they did and the journalist buried the lede.

    Having read the article, my take is that TCS is simply saying “we prefer to get paid for high end AI engineering work rather than low end call center work.”

    If you’re not an FT subscriber, hopefully someone will post a free link. It is not worth subscribing to get this PR piece.

  • by IronWolve on 4/25/24, 7:02 AM

    Businesses already use speech recognition for intake of calls. The first line of screening can easily be enhanced by AI, and servicenow is integrating it for intake for tickets already via teams. Enhancing call trees and trained on tickets.

    Ticket routing is simple for AI, the actual work by engineers to fix issues probably wont go away if someone has to tweak an app/service/vm/os. The skill level for fixing things are a beyond AI for now.

    Anything you can fill a form out, I can see AI assisting and offloaded.

  • by hwbunny on 4/25/24, 6:02 AM

    Nooo, everyone saying the opposite for years. AI will create more jobs. PEOPLE! They are lying, AI will not nuke jobs, definitely not. Pffff...