The BBC news site has an article on 55K job cuts within BT (British Telecom) over the next 6 years, with about 20% of those being replaced by AI, mainly on helpdesks.
I wonder if I’ll be able to understand the ‘person’ on the other end of the phone more or less ?
BT currently has 130K employees but is looking to cut that number with the move to fiber from copper.
The helpdesks and support lines of large companies have been pretty useless as is, if you ask me. Often times they not even have the authority to forward problems to the people in the company who can fix them. Additionally I encounter more often that the support has been given topics they are not allowed to discuss, like calling a customers problem a problem or taking accountibility and even malicious instructions e.g. failure to comply with subscription cancellations requests. Bonus points if the call center was outsourced and they barely speak you language.
Incoming training dataset:
Level 1 help desk shouldn’t even exist anymore with what it has become. Chat GPT can already do a better job than every single one of those people. That tier does nothing but read off a script they are given anyway for the typical topics and doesn’t have the ability to actually escalate things to someone who can help until they have wasted many hours, otherwise it is held against them by their employer.
There are people good at helpdesk but the tragedy of that by far is they’re wasted doing it. Callers treat them like doormats, the business angle considers their only job to make the caller go away with the shortest handling time, so fixing things is actually a negative, or a side product at best.
This is even better when it’s outsourced (which BT do, whether or not they’re talking about these teams, I’m sure they’d love to be) as noone has authority (both directions) to chastise any party for being useless, and your boss only cares that their boss is cheap and it’s a 3 or 5yr term.
I disagree that it can do better than ‘those people’, because the problem is not can’t, its that they’re not allowed to, or are negatively reinforced against. Can it be a better automated go away script, i guess so - but that’s what they want. It’s just not what’s in the brochure. Basically get ready for this whenever you need to interact with a services company.
I don’t think we’re there yet, at all, when it comes to AI replacing fully a human job.
Everything you said I agree with but it’s a fault of the structure inside the company and an AI is gonna answer in the exact same ways. It’s just making it cheaper for the companies. Also people in customer support on the phone lines are ofter very much under paid and things only gotten worse over time. I don’t blame them for working as much as they’re paid.
AI is gonna do the same thing. They’re not gonna give the AI power to solve issues. You’re still gonna get transfered to someone higher in the chain. Maybe it will reduce waiting times, but that’s not enough to just get canned responses. The bottleneck are internal company structures and low wages.
I think you nailed it.
IT Crowd. Best ever. If we don’t have people like Roy in RL anymore, we won’t ever see this kind of character in culture again.
My favorite is the laptop scene with Jen. It also makes me enjoy and laugh about similar things I’ve seen in my career.
Always worth to watch, especially when working in IT.