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
COMPUTER SAYS YES AND DOES SOMETHING COMPLETELY STUPIDThe tech can be shit, but it will get sold to Corporations because of fomo, and because Corps have Learnt they don't need high Quality products and services to survive.
Once large Corps achieve scale, they make cash primarily through Financial Engineering not Product - so seeking out and taking advantage of cross border differences in interest rates, corporate tax rates, forex, labor, real estate/rent, govt subsidies, regulations, pumping up the stock through offshore accounts etc etc. Add to that how they use their size to swallow up or obliterate smaller competition and you end up with a class of people in charge that have learnt product and service quality is secondary to their survival.
In addition to Financial Engineering, Demand Engineering (or Marketing/advertising) games are won by who ever has the largest Ad budget. And that is Large Corps.
So Creatives, Engineers, Product/Service designers or anyone who cares about Quality have to come up with tactics and strategies to counter the influence of Financial and Demand Engineering.
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.
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.