What's worse than laying off workers with a text message? How about a text message telling them they're being replaced by an AI chatbot. Suumit Shah, CEO of the e-commerce platform Dukaan, didn't even pipe the news through a recreation of George Clooney's decisive yet consoling voice. Instead, he boasted about it on Twitter.
"We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely," Shah wrote in a thread that's been viewed over 1.5 million times since being posted. In the thread, Shah wrote that an AI chatbot took less than two minutes to respond to customer queries, while his human support staff took over two hours.
The silver lining is that his indiscretion means more people know what "AI" is for, at least as far as these guys are concerned. Note the "AI made us do it" logic, too, you'll be seeing a lot of that!
