Imagine, whatever it is, a customer service centre where everyone speaks the same language.
An artificial intelligence translation platform called Alorica, developed by Irvine, California-based Alorica, enables its customer support professionals to converse with clients in 200 distinct languages and 75 dialects.
Therefore, a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong who complains about a faulty printer or an inaccurate bank statement can be assisted by an Alorica agent who speaks, say, just Spanish. Alorica wouldn’t require a Cantonese-speaking representative.
AI is capable of such things. And there’s also the possibility of a threat: if chatbots can take over the effort, businesses might find they need fewer workers and eliminate some positions. However, Alorica isn’t eliminating jobs. It continues to hire a lot.
AI may not end up being the job killer that many people fear, according to Alorica’s experience as well as that of other businesses, such as the furniture retailer IKEA.
However, it’s possible that technology will end up doing more or creating more jobs in the same way as earlier technological innovations like the steam engine, electricity, and the Internet.
Additionally, presumably increasing worker productivity generally, this will ultimately help employees, businesses, and the economy.
Artificial intelligence (AI) “will affect many jobs — maybe every job indirectly to some extent,” according to Indeed Hiring Lab economist Nick Bunker.
However, I don’t think it will result in something like widespread joblessness. Other significant technological advancements in our past haven’t significantly increased unemployment. Technology both creates and destroys. There are going to be new employment opportunities.
Fundamentally, artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to carry out tasks that were previously believed to require human intelligence.
The technology has been around in its early forms for many years. It was first developed in the 1950s at what is now Carnegie Mellon University as a problem-solving computer program called Logic Theorist.
Consider voice assistants from more modern times, such as Alexa and Siri. Consider IBM’s Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer that defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.
When OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that can write computer code, conduct conversations, make music, write essays, and produce a limitless supply of knowledge, in 2022, AI really took off in the public eye.
Concerns about chatbots replacing freelance writers, editors, coders, telemarketers, customer service representatives, paralegals, and many other professions have been voiced since the advent of generative AI.
“AI is going to change the way that a lot of current jobs function and eliminate a lot of current jobs,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in a May talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
However, the widely held belief that AI chatbots would eventually replace service employees in the same manner that physical robots eliminated many factory and warehouse jobs isn’t materializing in any significant way just yet. Perhaps it never will, too.
According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, there is “little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment,” as it stated last month.
The advisors pointed out that past experiences have shown that technology usually increases business productivity, accelerating economic growth and generating unanticipated new employment categories.
They referenced a research conducted last year under the direction of renowned MIT economist David Autor, which found that 60% of the employment held by Americans in 2018 were made possible by later-emerging technology, and that the majority of these jobs did not even exist in 1940.
Challenger, Grey & Christmas, an outplacement agency that monitors layoffs, stated that it has not yet observed a significant amount of layoffs linked to labor-saving AI.
Andy Challenger, the company’s sales manager, stated, “I don’t think we’ve started seeing companies saying they’ve saved lots of money or cut jobs they no longer need because of this.” “That might occur later. However, it hasn’t finished yet.
He compared it to going from a Corolla to a Tesla. “What took hours to complete now only takes minutes. Furthermore, the accuracy is astounding.
In a similar vein, a study conducted last year by academics at London’s Imperial College Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research, and Harvard Business School discovered that within eight months after ChatGPT’s launch, job advertisements for authors, developers, and artists fell.
Laptops 1000Researchers from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University found in a 2023 study that the occupations most exposed to ChatGPT-like language models were telemarketers and English and foreign language instructors.
However, exposure to AI may not always equate to job loss. AI can also handle tedious duties, freeing up humans to work on more imaginative projects.
For instance, in 2021 the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA unveiled a chatbot for customer support designed to address basic questions. IKEA retrained 8,500 customer service employees to perform responsibilities including giving consumers interior design advice and handling challenging customer calls, rather than eliminating employment.
Additionally, chatbots can be used to increase employee productivity by enhancing rather than replacing their labor.
A research conducted by Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of MIT and Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University followed 5,200 customer service representatives at a Fortune 500 firm who utilized generative AI-based assistants.
The AI tool offered insightful customer service recommendations. Links to pertinent internal documents were also provided.
According to the survey, those who employed the chatbot outperformed their peers in terms of productivity by 14%. They answered more calls and did so more quickly. The least experienced and least skilled workers accounted for the largest productivity gains (34%) in the workforce.
One customer service representative at an Alorica call centre in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been having trouble getting the information she required to respond to enquiries promptly.
Her “handle time,” or the amount of time it takes to handle customer calls, decreased in four months from an average of 14 minutes per call to just over seven minutes after Alorica educated her to use AI tools.
One group of 850 Alorica reps saw a reduction in their average handle time from slightly over eight minutes to six minutes over the course of six months thanks to the AI technologies.
Instead of eight calls per hour, they can now handle ten, which equates to an extra sixteen calls in an eight-hour workday.
When a customer calls, Alorica representatives can use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to swiftly obtain information about them. For example, they can examine the customer’s order history or find out if they had previously called and hung up in frustration.
Assume, according to co-CEO of Alorica Mike Clifton, that a client claims to have received the incorrect item. He stated that the agent only needs to “hit replace, and the product will be there tomorrow.” Is there anything else I can do to assist you? No? Press. Completed. In for thirty seconds, then out.
With the use of the company’s Real-time Voice Language Translation service, clients and Alorica representatives may now converse in their native tongues.
Rene Paiz, vice president of customer service, said, “It allows (Alorica reps) to handle every call they get.” “I don’t need to hire outside of my organization” in order to locate a language speaker.
Still, Alorica isn’t eliminating jobs. It is still hiring, and it is looking for people who are more at ease with modern technologies. “We are currently hiring,” Paiz states. “There are a lot of things that need to be done outside.”
