Suumit Shah, the CEO of the enterprise e-commerce startup Dukaan announced on July 10 that his company has laid off 90% of its support staff and replaced them with an AI chatbot. Dukaan has also created Bot9.ai which will allow other companies to create customer-support AI chatbots based on their own businesses, Shah announced. We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. The results? Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT! Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s Customer support costs reduced by ~85% Here's how's we did it ? — Suumit Shah (@suumitshah) July 10, 2023 Why it matters: One of the concerns people have about generative AI is that it will lead to job losses. While tech companies like OpenAI and IBM have said that AI tools will work in partnership with human beings, companies like Dukaan laying off their employees tell us that these fears are not unfounded. This is especially true given that Dukaan’s Bot9.ai will allow more companies to follow in its footsteps. Why did Dukaan replace staff with a chatbot? “Why would someone with a tech/product expertise work as a support agent?” Shah tweeted, elaborating that when experts don’t want to work in customer support, it makes customer support a "struggle" and leads to "delayed responses" and "poor communication", among other shortcomings. Consequently, to deal with these issues, the company created a chatbot called “Lina”. The bot was tested…
