How Will AI Impact Call Center Jobs in India? (msn.com)
- Reference: 0178141793
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/22/197235/how-will-ai-impact-call-center-jobs-in-india
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ai-is-transforming-indian-call-centers-what-does-it-mean-for-workers/ar-AA1Hb8MR
2023 saw the arrival of a real-time "accent-altering software" — now used by at least 42,000 call center agents:
> Those who use the software are engaging in "digital whitewashing," critics say, which helps explain why the industry prefers the term "accent translation" over "accent neutralization." But companies say it's delivering results: happier customers, satisfied agents, faster calls.
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> Many are not convinced. Whatever short-term gains automation may offer to workers, they say, it will ultimately eliminate far more jobs than it creates. They point to the quality assurance process: When callers hear, "this call may be monitored," that now usually refers to an AI system, not a human [which now can review all calls for compliance and tone]... "AI is going to crush entry-level white-collar hiring over the next 24 to 36 months," said Mark Serdar, who has spent his career helping Fortune 500 companies expand their global workforce. "And it's happening faster than most people realize...." Already, chatbots, or "virtual agents," are handling basic tasks like password resets or balance updates. AI systems are writing code, translating emails, onboarding patients, and analyzing applications for credit cards, mortgages and insurance. The human jobs are changing, too. AI "co-pilots" are providing call center agents with instant answers and suggested scripts. At some companies, bots have started handling the calls.
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> There is no shortage of ominous predictions about the implications for India's labor force. Within a year, there will only be a "minimal" need for call centers, K Krithivasan, CEO of Indian IT company Tata Consultancy Services, recently [2]told the Financial Times . The Brookings Institution [3]found 86 percent of customer service tasks have "high automation potential." More than a quarter of jobs in India have "high exposure" to AI, the International Monetary Fund has [4]warned . "There is a rapid wave coming," said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam, a leading Indian AI firm, which recently helped a major insurance provider make 40 million automated phone calls informing enrollees that their insurance program was expiring. He said corporate clients are all asking him to help reduce headcount...
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> While AI may be phasing out certain jobs, its defenders say it is also creating different kinds of opportunities. Teleperformance, along with hundreds of other companies, has hired thousands of [5]data annotators in India — many of them women in small towns and rural areas — to label training images and videos for AI systems. Prompt engineers, data scientists, AI trainers and speech scientists are all newly in demand... At some firms, those who previously worked in quality assurance have transitioned to performance coaching, said [Sharath Narayana, co-founder of AI speech tools company Sanas], whose previous firm, Observe.ai, also built QA software. Still, he admits, 10 to 20 percent of workers he observed "could not upskill at all" and were probably let go.
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> Even the most hopeful admit that workers who can't adapt will fall behind. "It's like the industrial revolution," said Prithvijit Roy, Accenture's former lead for its Global AI Hub. "Some will suffer."
The article also notes that while Indian universities produce over a million engineering graduates each year, "placement rates are falling at leading IT firms; salaries have stagnated."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/ai-is-transforming-indian-call-centers-what-does-it-mean-for-workers/ar-AA1Hb8MR
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/149681f0-ea71-42b0-b85b-86073354fb73
[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/generative-ai-the-american-worker-and-the-future-of-work/
[4] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/Staff-Discussion-Notes/Issues/2024/01/14/Gen-AI-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Work-542379?cid=bl-com-SDNEA2024001
[5] https://fiftytwo.in/story/human-touch/
My optimistic hope (Score:2)
Future AI will be trained on every detail of product use, troubleshooting and repair. Users will be able to get highly accurate answers, as if they were talking to the designer or maintenance expert.
The pessimistic reality
Tech support is seen as a cost to be minimized and companies will gladly replace awful Indian tech support workers with even worse AI
Re: My optimistic hope (Score:2)
The former will cost more than the latter, so we will get worse and not better
It has to! All they do is read a script. (Score:3)
Not much to replace.
what about ai? (Score:3, Insightful)
4 out of the 9 front page stories on this site have the word AI in them. You can tell the quality of these annoying,repetitive, bloviating pieces by this gem,
> Already, chatbots, or "virtual agents," are handling basic tasks like password resets
The Internet has been around for at least 40 years, at no point did you need AI to reset a fucking password. What a fucking joke these self-aggrandizing advertisements have become! It's like listening to the blowhards in power talk about how smart they are.
It's the third industrial revolution (Score:2)
So yeah you're going to see a lot of stories about it. It is a fundamental change in how we work and what types of work we are allowed to do.
However it's too much for brains that evolved on the Savannah to deal with. Sort of like how nobody fully understands the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire. Just how much power a billionaire wields by comparison...
And also we all know the shit is about to hit the fan so there's going to be a whole hell of a lot of coping going on rather than ac
Re: (Score:1)
A couple decades ago I worked in a call center for one of the biggest national banks in the US. I worked on the password reset queue with about a dozen other people. All we did all day was reset passwords for bank employees, not customers, employees . 99% of it was talking them through the 4 steps on the self-serve portal to reset the password to almost every system they used. There were only a few edge cases with certain mainframe systems that we actually had to go in and do something, but those were few
Startup idea -- available free to any Indian (Score:2, Offtopic)
How about making an AI that teaches food handlers how to use utensils instead of touching food with their hands?
India is by far the world's most unhygienic country: Reference: [1]https://ourworldindata.org/gra... [ourworldindata.org]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-due-to-unsafe-sanitation?mapSelect=~MUS
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think unsafe sanitation means what you think it means.
> Unsafe sanitation includes practices like open defecation and improper treatment of household wastewater. It is linked to the spread of diseases like cholera, dysentery, typhoid, intestinal worms, and polio.Unsafe sanitation exacerbates impaired growth and development in children and contributes to the problem of antimicrobial resistance.
. Can you guess where I got that definition?
Anyone know where the racism against Indians (Score:2, Interesting)
Is coming from? I don't believe for a second that it's an organic response to the huge flood of cheap H-1B labor. It's got to be engineered. I'm just curious why.
I saw you on mask reposting these same kind of racist comments and that guy is so far behind the curve his Earth is flat. If he's picking it up it's because somebody is signal boosting it and I'm not sure why. Maybe pakistan?
I've always been surprised Europe doesn't try to counteract the Russian propaganda hitting america.
Re: (Score:3)
Uh, I am not the racist. You are. You've been strongly against H1B and immigration -- that's fueled by racism. The Indian cultural problem of normalizing low hygiene is a very real problem with consequences. I posted it to hope it gets corrected. Not all Indians are accepting of it, but many are because they grew up with it as it slowly got introduced. India in the past used to be very clean, they had more advanced sanitation than most of the world. After high population growth and low finances 1. the water
Re: (Score:2)
Btw .. what do you mean "you saw me on mask" .. I don't even know what that is. I'm only mainly active on slashdot, I try other social media sites but I don't think I posted about this there. And nobody's paying me. I mean, I wish they would though. Would gladly post any BS for a fee.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry musk not mask. That's where you're picking up these talking points. Elon Musk. It was supposed to read I saw Elon Musk but that's what I get for relying on speech to text.
Always funny to watch people spread racist talking points and pretend they aren't right wing extremists. God I hope you're getting paid for this. It would be sad if you were doing it for free. That's some fine sealioning either way. Putin is proud and thanks you for your service.
Anyway anyone know why all these racists are go
Local connections (Score:2)
When you call the store three miles from you using a local number, you won't get routed to Vidhya who's sitting in a call center somewhere in India.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of local numbers route to large companies with call centers. It kills small local businesses.
Re: (Score:2)
This was for Best Buy.
Re: (Score:2)
> When you call the store three miles from you using a local number, you won't get routed to Vidhya who's sitting in a call center somewhere in India.
Not true: I had exactly this happen to me this past week. FWIW, it was the local UPS store... and I got routed to India instead of the phone at the local store despite having called the local number.
Then not only did I have to navigate a phone tree that very nearly caused me to throw the phone across the room, but then (after hitting '0' so many times I lost count) got to speak to two lovely Indians, neither of whom -- as far as I could tell - had more than a very basic grasp of English. I say "as far as I
AI is terrible (Score:3)
I just had a very frustrating experience trying to solve a simple problem with my Tesla insurance where it wanted the address where my car is garaged (this was an email from the insurance company).
I couldn't do this online but had to call.
The call was answered by an AI which went through a tedious process of irrelevant questions and in the end said it couldn't help me and I had to talk to a real person. Literally 6 hours on hold (several calls... I kept getting disconnected) and no human ever answered the call.
The AI could detect that I was getting frustrated (insightful) and it did apologize for the frustration but it still couldn't help.
I don't think this AI is very useful.
I also question the source of the original email. I've had this insurance for over 3 years and never had a problem but all of a sudden I get this request for my garage address along with a threat to not renew my policy. I wonder if Musk has installed his "Grok" AI at the insurance company and it's looking for trouble.
Re: (Score:2)
> ...The call was answered by an AI which went through a tedious process of irrelevant questions and in the end said it couldn't help me and I had to talk to a real person. Literally 6 hours on hold (several calls... I kept getting disconnected) and no human ever answered the call. The AI could detect that I was getting frustrated (insightful) and it did apologize for the frustration but it still couldn't help...
I haven't had to deal with Tesla insurance, but with my regular carrier, alternating between "agent", "cancel policy" and various curse words gets a human on the line pretty quickly. Works with eBay too.
You can still tell it's Indians on the phone (Score:2)
Accent whitewashing can only do so much. The real problem is the right rhythm, and also very often the choice of words and common phrases. I can usually tell if it's a whitewashed Indian within first 30 seconds. They just sound unnatural.
hoping both fail (Score:1)
If we are super lucky, both AI and Indian call centers will fail.