WASHINGTON (AP) — Imagine a customer service center that speaks your language, whatever that may be.
Alorica, an Irvine, California-based company that operates customer service centers around the world, artificial intelligence A translation tool that enables agents to communicate with customers who speak 200 languages and 75 dialects.
That means, for example, an Alorica representative who only speaks Spanish can field a complaint from a Cantonese-speaker in Hong Kong about a malfunctioning printer or an incorrect bank statement, without Alorica needing to hire a Cantonese-speaker.
That’s the power of AI, and the potential threat: companies may no longer need it. Number of Employees — and would likely cut some jobs if chatbots could handle the workload instead. But the fact is, Alorica isn’t cutting jobs; the company is still actively hiring.
The experiences of Alorica and other companies, such as furniture retailer IKEA, suggest that AI may not be the job-disposer that many fear. Instead, the technology may be more like past breakthroughs like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet: it will displace some jobs and create others, perhaps even making workers more productive overall, ultimately benefiting them, their employers, and the economy.
Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, said AI “will impact a huge number of jobs. It will probably indirectly impact every job to some degree. But I don’t think AI will lead to mass unemployment. There have been other big technological events in history that didn’t lead to a huge increase in unemployment. Technology destroys, but it also creates. New jobs will be created.”
The essence of artificial intelligence Machines that perform tasks Until now, this was thought to require human intelligence. Early versions of the technology have been around for decades, beginning with Logic Theorist, a problem-solving computer program developed at what is now Carnegie Mellon University, in the 1950s. More recently, there are voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, or IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
It’s 2022 when AI really starts to penetrate people’s consciousness. OpenAI Introduces ChatGPTis a generative AI tool that can hold conversations, write computer code, compose music, write essays, and provide endless streams of information. The emergence of generative AI has raised concerns that chatbots could replace many jobs, including freelance writers, editors, programmers, telemarketers, customer service representatives, and paralegals.
“AI will eliminate many existing jobs and change how many existing jobs are done,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said at an MIT panel in May.
But the widely held assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, just as physical robots have replaced many factory and warehouse jobs, has so far not widely come to fruition — or at least, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month “There is little evidence that AI will have a negative impact on overall employment.” The advisers noted that technology has generally been shown to make companies more productive, spur economic growth and create new types of jobs in unexpected ways.
They cited a study this year by the prominent MIT economist David Autor that concluded that 60% of the jobs held by Americans in 2018 didn’t even exist in 1940, and were created by technologies that came along later.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm that tracks job cuts, said there wasn’t much evidence yet that labor-saving AI was the cause of job cuts.
“I don’t think we’ve yet to see companies say this has saved them a ton of money or eliminated jobs they no longer need,” said Andy Challenger, the company’s sales manager. “That may be in the future, but it’s not here yet.”
At the same time, concerns that AI poses serious threats to some jobs are not unfounded.
Take Sumit Shah, the Indian entrepreneur who caused a stir last year when he boasted that he had replaced 90% of his customer support staff with a chatbot called Lina. Shah’s company, Dukaan, helps customers build e-commerce sites, and the effort cut response times to inquiries from one minute and 44 seconds to “instant.” It also cut the time needed to resolve issues from typically more than two hours to just over three minutes.
“The AI’s ability to accurately process complex queries is key,” Shah said in an email.
The cost of providing customer support has fallen by 85 percent, he said.
“Harsh? Yes. Necessary? Of course,” Shah posted to X.
Dukan has expanded its use of AI into sales and analytics, and Shah said the tool is becoming more and more powerful.
“It’s like upgrading from a Corolla to a Tesla,” he says. “What used to take hours now takes minutes, and the accuracy is at a whole new level.”
Similarly, researchers from Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and Imperial College Business School in London found in a study last year that Job listings for writers, programmers, and artists Within eight months of its launch, ChatGPT had plummeted.
A 2023 study by researchers from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University concluded that telemarketers and English and foreign language teachers are among the professions most exposed to language models like ChatGPT. But exposure to AI doesn’t necessarily mean people will lose their jobs to it. AI can take over mundane tasks, freeing people up to do more creative work.
For example, Swedish furniture retailer IKEA introduced a customer service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple inquiries. Instead of cutting staff, IKEA retrained its 8,500 customer service employees whose responsibilities include advising customers on interior design and handling complex customer calls.
Chatbots can also be deployed to make workers more efficient by complementing their jobs rather than replacing them. A study by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Daniel Lee and Lindsay Raymond of MIT followed 5,200 customer support representatives from a Fortune 500 company and had them use an AI-based generative assistant. The AI tool offered valuable suggestions on how to respond to customers. It also provided links to relevant internal company documents.
The study found that employees who used chatbots were 14% more productive than those who didn’t: they handled more calls and responded faster. The biggest productivity gains were seen among the least experienced and least skilled employees, at 34%.
At Alorica’s call center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a customer service representative struggled to access the information she needed to quickly process calls. When Alorica trained her to use AI tools, her “handle time” — the time it takes to resolve a customer call — decreased from an average of 14 minutes per call to just over 7 minutes in four months.
Over the course of six months, the AI tools helped Alorica’s group of 850 agents reduce their average handle time from just over eight minutes to six minutes. They’re now able to handle 10 calls per hour instead of eight, translating to an extra 16 calls in an eight-hour day.
Alorica’s agents can use AI tools to quickly access information about callers, for example checking their order history or determining whether they’ve called before and hung up in frustration.
When a customer complains they received the wrong product, Alorica co-CEO Mike Clifton says, a representative “hits the exchange button and it’ll be there tomorrow,” and “we say, ‘Is there anything else we can help you with? Is there anything else we can help you with?’ And click. Done. It takes 30 seconds.”
Now, the company has started using real-time speech language translation tools, allowing customers and Alorica agents to speak and hear each other in their own language.
“This allows[Alorica representatives]to respond to every call they get,” said Rene Pays, vice president of customer service, “so they don’t have to hire outside talent just to find someone who speaks a certain language.”
But Alorica is not cutting staff. The company continues to hire, and is looking to hire more people with experience in new technologies.
“We’re actively recruiting,” Pays said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
