Is AI really a job killer? This California company is putting those fears to rest

Consider a customer service center that speaks your language, whatever it is.

Alorica, an Irvine, California-based company that manages customer service centers around the world, has launched an intelligent translation tool that allows its agents to speak to customers in 200 languages ​​and 75 dialects.

So an Alorica speaking representative, he says, only a Spanish can complain about a balky printer or an incorrect bank statement from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica will not need to hire a Cantonese speaking rep.

Such is the power of AI. And, potentially, a threat: Maybe companies won’t need as many workers – and will cut back on certain jobs – if chatbots can handle the work instead. But the thing is, Alorica is not cutting jobs. It is still forced to rent.

The experience of Alorica – and that of other companies, including the furniture retailer IKEA – shows that AI may not be seen as the job killer that many people fear. Instead, technology may resemble the achievements of the past – the steam engine, electricity, the Internet: That is, eliminating some jobs while creating others. And perhaps that makes workers more productive in general, ultimately benefiting themselves, their employers and the economy.

Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said he thinks AI “will affect a lot of jobs — maybe all jobs indirectly to some degree. But I don’t think it’s going to lead to, say, mass unemployment. We’ve seen other big tech events in history.” ours, and those did not lead to a huge increase in unemployment. Technology destroys but also creates new jobs.”

At its core, artificial intelligence empowers machines to perform tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence. The technology has been around in early versions for decades, dating back to the computer problem-solving program Logic Theorist, which was developed in the 1950s at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. More recently, think of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Or IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

AI began to gain public attention in 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an AI productivity tool that can conduct conversations, write computer code, compose music, art essays and provide endless streams of information. The advent of artificial intelligence has raised concerns that chatbots will replace freelance writers, editors, coders, telemarketers, customer service representatives, law enforcement officers and many others.

“AI will eliminate many current jobs, and this will change the way many current jobs work,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, in an interview at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May.

Yet the widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way portable robots are taking over many jobs in factories and warehouses, isn’t true in any widespread way — yet, anyway. And probably never will.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month it had found “little evidence that AI will have a negative impact on overall employment.” The consultants noted that history shows that technology tends to make companies more productive, accelerate economic growth and create new types of jobs in unexpected ways.

They cited a study this year led by David Autor, a leading economist at MIT: It concluded that 60% of the jobs Americans held in 2018 did not even exist in 1940, as they were created only by later technologies.

Staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has yet to see much evidence of layoffs that could be caused by AI.

“I don’t think we’ve started to see companies saying they’ve saved a lot of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this,” said Andy Challenger, who leads the company’s sales team. “That may come in the future. But it’s not playing yet.”

At the same time, fears that AI poses a serious threat to some job categories are unfounded.

Consider Suumit Shah, the Indian entrepreneur who caused a stir last year by boasting that he outsourced 90% of his customer support staff to a chatbot called Lina. The move by Shah’s company, Dukaan, which helps clients set up e-commerce sites, reduced the response time to an inquiry from 1 minute, 44 seconds to “instant.” It also reduces the average time required to resolve issues from more than two hours to more than three minutes.

“It’s all about AI’s ability to handle complex questions with precision,” Shah said via email.

The cost of providing customer support, he said, has dropped by 85%.

“Is it difficult? Yes. Is it necessary? Absolutely,” Shah told X.

Dukaan has expanded its use of AI in marketing and analytics. The tools, says Shah, continue to grow in strength.

“It’s like upgrading from a Corolla to a Tesla,” he said. “What used to take hours now takes minutes. And accuracy is on a whole new level. “

Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and London’s Imperial College Business School found in a study last year that job postings for writers, coders and artists dropped within eight months of ChatGPT’s arrival.

A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University concluded that telemarketers and teachers of English and foreign languages ​​hold jobs that are highly exposed to language models such as ChatGPT. But being exposed to AI doesn’t mean you lose your job to it. AI can also do the heavy lifting, freeing up humans to do more creative work.

Swedish furniture retailer IKEA, for example, is launching a customer service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple questions. Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer service employees to handle tasks such as advising customers on interior design and fielding complex customer calls.

Chatbots can also be deployed to make employees more efficient, completing their work rather than eliminating it. A study by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT tracked 5,200 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 company using an AI-based productivity assistant. The AI ​​tool provided valuable suggestions for customer management. It also provided links to relevant internal documents.

Those who used a chatbot, the study found, showed 14% more productivity than their counterparts who did not use it. They took more calls and finished sooner. The biggest productivity gains – 34% – come from low-skilled, low-skilled workers.

At an Alorica call center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one customer representative has been struggling to access the information she needs to handle calls quickly. After Alorica trained him to use AI tools, his “handover time” — how long it takes to resolve customer calls — dropped from an average of 14 minutes to a call of just over seven minutes in four months.

Over a six-month period, AI tools helped one group of 850 Alorica reps reduce their average hold time to six minutes, from more than eight minutes. Now they can make 10 calls an hour instead of eight – 16 more calls in an eight-hour day.

Alorica agents can use AI tools to quickly access information about customers who call – to check their order history, say, or find out if they’ve called before and hung up out of frustration.

Say, says Mike Clifton, CEO of Alorica, a customer complains that they received the wrong product. An agent “can hit one, and the product will be there tomorrow,” he said. ” ‘Is there anything else I can help you with? No?’ Click. Done. Thirty seconds and you’re out again.”

The company is now rolling out its Real-Time Voice Language Translation tool, which allows customers and Alorica agents to speak and hear each other in their own languages.

“It allows (Alorica reps) to handle all the calls they get,” said Rene Paiz, vice president of customer service. “I don’t have to hire outside” just to find someone who speaks a certain language.

However, Alorica is not cutting jobs. It continues to seek employment – increasingly, those who are comfortable with new technologies.

“We are still actively hiring,” said Paiz. “There’s a lot to be done out there.”

—Paul Wiseman, AP Economics writer