Artificial intelligence is threatening jobs, some in particular. One sector that is a legitimate concern is call centers. They could soon disappear. That is what the head of an Indian IT giant believes.
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Which industry is it? Techspot.com reports on a conversation with Krithi Krithivasan, head of the Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), with the Financial Times. TCS employs more than 616,000 people worldwide and is one of the largest companies on the subcontinent. They talk to him about the development of the call center market – and he brings a gloomy forecast for its employees.
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AI threatens 17 million jobs
What could happen to the call center industry? Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Meta AI or Microsoft Copilot have been gaining enormous popularity and quality in recent years: the better the results in communication with people, the more attractive it becomes for companies to use chatbots more widely – for example in customer or tech support.
According to Krithivasan, it will only take “a year or a few years” for AI to reduce the number of jobs in call centers to a minimum. Human employees will largely only act as backups in case the upstream AI cannot answer the customer’s questions.
Such application scenarios can already be found in many companies today and he assumes that this will quickly become the standard for the general population on a global scale. According to data from a special report on AI (via Gartner), around 17 million jobs would be affected directly in or in the professional environment of call centers.
How reliable are these forecasts? In general, such predictions should be treated with caution, even by experts. Ultimately, the processes within companies are complex and if the field of view is expanded to include entire sectors of the economy, the situation becomes even more confusing. After all, AI can just as easily create new fields of work. But Krithivasan sees one thing as certain: managers have a great desire to use AI – whether to save on labor or to reduce wages.
Of course, in addition to such negative stories for employees, there is also a bright side to artificial intelligence. But this is of no use to those who may soon be laid off, but rather to the companies that supply the hardware for the AI, such as Nvidia. In the following article, we take a look at the company’s share price performance: Anyone who had invested just 100 euros in Nvidia shares at the start of Covid-19 could buy the best graphics card for more than 2,000 euros today