AI may not steal many jobs. It might just make workers more efficient

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Imagine a customer service center that speaks your language, no matter what.

Alorica, a company in Irvine, California, which runs customer service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that allows representatives to converse with customers in 200 languages ​​and 75 dialects.

So Alorica’s representative spoke, he said, only Spaniards could complain about balky printers or incorrect bank statements from Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Alorica does not need to hire a Cantonese speaking rep.

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That’s the power of AI. And, potentially, a threat: Maybe companies won’t need as many employees — and will cut some jobs _ if chatbots can handle the workload. But the problem is, Alorica is not eliminating jobs. It’s still hiring aggressively.

Experience at Alorica – and at other companies, including furniture retailer IKEA – suggests that AI may not prove to be the job killer many fear. However, technology can be more like the breakthroughs of the past – the steam engine, electricity, the Internet: That is, it eliminates some jobs while creating others. And it may make workers more productive in general, to the benefit of themselves, employers and the economy.

Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said that AI “will affect many, many jobs — probably every job indirectly. But I don’t think it will lead to, say, mass unemployment. We’ve seen other big tech events in our history, and it does not cause great unemployment. Technology destroys but also creates. There will be new jobs to come.”

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In essence, artificial intelligence empowers machines to perform tasks previously thought to require human intelligence. The technology has been around in early versions for decades, emerging with a problem-solving computer program, Logic Theorist, built in the 1950s at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. More recently, think of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Or IBM’s chess computer, Deep Blue, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

AI really exploded into public consciousness in 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that can conduct conversations, write computer code, compose music, create essays and provide unlimited information. The advent of generative AI is raising concerns that chatbots will replace writers, editors, coders, telemarketers, customer service representatives, paralegals and more.

“AI is going to eliminate a lot of jobs today, and it’s going to change the way a lot of jobs are done today,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at a discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May.

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But the widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, the way physical robots are taking over many factories and warehouses, is not reality in a widespread way _ yet. And maybe it won’t.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found “little evidence that AI will have a negative impact on employment.” The advisers note that history shows technology has typically made companies more productive, accelerated economic growth and created new types of jobs in unexpected ways.

He cited a study this year led by David Autor, a famous MIT economist: it concluded that 60% of the jobs held by Americans in 2018 did not exist in 1940, because they were created by technologies that emerged later.

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks job cuts, says it hasn’t seen much evidence of layoffs that could be caused by labor-saving AI.

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

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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 had replaced 90% of his customer support staff with a chatbot named Lina. The move at Shah’s company, Dukaan, which helps customers set up e-commerce sites, reduced the response time to inquiries from 1 minute, 44 seconds to “instant”. It also reduced the typical time required to solve a problem from more than two hours to just three minutes.

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

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

“Hard? yes already. Essential? Indeed,” posted Shah on X.

Dukaan has developed the use of AI for sales and analytics. These devices, Shah said, continue to grow more powerful.

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

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

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A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and New York University concluded that telemarketers and teachers of English and foreign languages ​​hold jobs that are most visible in language models like ChatGPT. But getting hit by AI doesn’t mean losing your job. AI can also do the work, freeing people to do more creative tasks.

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

Chatbots can also be deployed to make workers more efficient, complementing their work rather than taking away from it. A study by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT tracked 5,200 customer support agents at Fortune 500 companies using generative AI-based assistants. AI tools provide valuable suggestions for handling customers. It also provides links to relevant internal documents.

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People who use chatbots, the study found, are 14% more productive than their colleagues who don’t. They handle more calls and resolve them faster. The biggest productivity gains – 34% – came from the least experienced and most skilled workers.

At Alorica’s call center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one customer service representative has been struggling to get access to the information she needs to handle calls quickly. After Alorica trained them to use the AI ​​tool, “handling time” — the length of time it takes to resolve a customer’s call — dropped over four months from an average of 14 minute calls to just over seven minutes.

During six months, the AI ​​tool helped one group of 850 Alorica repetitions reduce the average handling time to six minutes, from just over eight minutes. He can now make 10 calls an hour instead of eight – an additional 16 calls in an eight hour day.

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

Suppose, said Mike Clifton, co-CEO of Alorica, a customer complains that he received the wrong product. Agents can “hit change, and the product will be there tomorrow,” he said. ” ‘What else can I help you with? not?’ Click. finished. Thirty seconds in and out.”

Now the company is starting to use the Real-time Voice Language Translation tool, which allows Alorica customers and agents to speak and listen to each other in their own language.

“This allows (Alorica reps) to handle every call they get,” said Rene Paiz, vice president of customer service. “I don’t have to hire externals” just to find someone who speaks a certain language.

But Alorica is not cutting jobs. Continue to find employees _ more and more, who are comfortable with new technology.

“We’re still actively hiring,” Paiz said. “We have a lot to do there.”

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