Artificial intelligence threatens jobs, particularly in some sectors. One industry of particular concern is call centers. They could soon disappear, according to the CEO of an Indian IT giant.
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Which industry is being discussed? Techspot.com reports on a conversation with Krithi Krithivasan, CEO 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. He talks with them about the development of the call center market – and he brings a grim forecast for its employees.
AI threatens 17 million jobs
What could happen to the call center industry? Chatbots like ChatGPT, Meta AI, or Microsoft Copilot have gained enormous popularity and quality over the past few years: The better the results in communication with humans, the more appealing it becomes for companies to widely deploy chatbots – for example, in customer or tech support.
According to Krithivasan, it will only take “one year or a few years” before AI reduces jobs in call centers to a minimum. Human employees will primarily serve as backups in case the front-end AI cannot answer the customer’s questions.
Such use cases already exist at many companies, and he expects this to quickly become standard for the general population on a global scale. According to data from a specific report on AI (via Gartner), around 17 million jobs would be directly affected in or around the field of call centers.
How reliable are these forecasts? Generally, such predictions should be treated with caution, even by experts. Ultimately, the processes within companies are complex, and expanding the perspective to entire industries makes the situation even less clear. AI can equally create new job fields. But one thing Krithivasan sees as certain: The desire of managers to use AI is strong – whether to save labor costs or to reduce wages.
Of course, alongside such negative stories for employees, there is also a bright side to artificial intelligence. However, this does not benefit those who may soon be laid off, but rather the companies that provide the hardware for AI, such as Nvidia. In the following article, we take a look at the stock performance of the company: Anyone who had invested just 100 euros in Nvidia stock at the beginning of Covid-19 could now buy the best graphics card for over 2,000 euros
