Imagine a customer service center that speaks your language, no matter what it is.
Alorica, an Irvine, California-based company that operates customer service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that enables its representatives to speak with customers who speak 200 languages and 75 different dialects.
This way, an Alorica representative who speaks, for example, only Spanish, can handle a complaint about a faulty printer or an incorrect bank statement from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica would not need to hire a Cantonese-speaking representative.
Such is the power of AI. And, potentially, the threat: Maybe companies won’t need as many employees and will eliminate some jobs if chatbots can handle the workload instead. But the problem is that Alorica isn’t eliminating jobs. It’s still hiring aggressively.
The experience at Alorica and other companies, including furniture chain IKEA, suggests that AI may not be the job destroyer many people fear.
Instead, technology could turn out to be more like advances of the past (the steam engine, electricity, the Internet): eliminating some jobs and creating others, and probably making workers more productive overall, to the benefit of themselves, their employers, and the economy.
Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said he thinks AI will affect a lot of jobs, maybe all jobs indirectly to some extent. “But I don’t think it’s going to cause, for example, mass unemployment. We’ve seen other big technological events in our history and they didn’t cause a huge spike in unemployment. Technology destroys, but it also creates. New jobs will emerge.”
Essentially, artificial intelligence allows machines to perform tasks that were once thought to require human intelligence. The technology has been around for decades in its earliest forms, starting with a problem-solving computer program called Logic Theorist, developed in the 1950s at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. More recently, think of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, or IBM’s chess-playing computer Deep Blue, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
AI really burst into the public consciousness in 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the generative AI tool that can hold conversations, write computer code, compose music, write essays, and provide endless streams of information. The advent of generative AI has raised concerns that chatbots will replace writers, editors, programmers, telemarketers, customer service representatives, paralegals, and many more.
“AI is going to eliminate a lot of today’s jobs and it’s going to change the way a lot of jobs work,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, at a panel discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May.
However, the widely held assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, in the same way that physical robots took over many jobs in factories and warehouses, is not becoming a widespread reality — at least for now. And it may never do so.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that it found little evidence that AI will negatively impact overall employment.
The advisers noted that history shows that technology generally makes businesses more productive, accelerating economic growth and creating new types of jobs in unexpected ways.
They cited a study this year led by David Autor, a prominent MIT economist: It concluded that 60 percent of the jobs Americans had in 2018 did not even exist in 1940, having been created by technologies that emerged only later.
Job placement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which tracks job cuts, said it has not yet seen much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI.
“I don’t think we’ve started to see companies say they’ve saved a lot of money or cut jobs they don’t need anymore because of this,” said Andy Challenger, who heads the company’s sales team. “That may happen in the future, but it’s not yet realized.”
At the same time, fears that AI poses a serious threat to some job categories are not unfounded.
Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a stir last year by boasting that he had replaced 90 percent of his customer service staff with a chatbot called Lina. The move by Shah’s company, Dukaan, which helps clients build e-commerce sites, reduced the response time to a query from 1 minute and 44 seconds to “instant.”
It also reduced the typical time required to resolve issues from more than two hours to just over three minutes.
“It’s about AI’s ability to handle complex queries accurately,” Shah said via email.
The cost of providing customer support, he said, fell by 85 percent.
‘Difficult? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,’ Shah posted on X.
Dukaan has expanded its use of AI to sales and analytics, and Shah says the tools are becoming more powerful.
“It’s like going from a Corolla to a Tesla,” he said. “What used to take hours now takes minutes. And the precision is on a whole new level.”
Similarly, researchers at Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and Imperial College Business School in London found in a study last year that job postings for writers, programmers and artists fell in the eight months after ChatGPT launched.
A 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University found that telemarketers and English and foreign language teachers held the jobs most exposed to language models similar to ChatGPT. But being exposed to AI doesn’t necessarily mean losing your job because of it. AI can also do the heavy lifting, freeing up people to pursue more creative tasks.
For example, Swedish furniture chain IKEA introduced a customer service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple queries. Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer service workers to handle tasks such as advising customers on interior design and handling complicated customer calls.
Chatbots can also be used to increase workers’ efficiency by complementing their work rather than eliminating it. A study by Stanford University’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT’s Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond tracked 5,200 customer service agents at a Fortune 500 company who used an AI-based generative assistant. The AI tool offered valuable suggestions for handling customers and also provided links to relevant internal documents.
The study found that those who used the chatbot proved to be 14 percent more productive than their colleagues who didn’t. They took more calls and completed them faster. The biggest productivity gains (34 percent) came from less experienced and less skilled workers.
At an Alorica call center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a customer service representative had been struggling to access the information she needed to answer calls quickly. After Alorica trained her to use AI tools, her handle time — the time it takes to resolve customer calls — dropped over four months from an average of 14 minutes per call to just over seven minutes.
Over a six-month period, AI tools helped a group of 850 Alorica representatives reduce their average handling time to six minutes, down from just eight minutes. They can now handle 10 calls per hour instead of eight—that’s 16 additional calls in an eight-hour workday.
Alorica agents can use AI tools to quickly access information about customers who call to check their order history, for example, or determine whether they had called before and hung up out of frustration.
Suppose, said Mike Clifton, co-CEO of Alorica, a customer complains that they received the wrong product. “The agent can click replace and the product will arrive tomorrow,” he said. “‘Is there anything else I can help you with? No?’ Click. Done. In thirty seconds, you’re in and out.”
Now the company is beginning to use its real-time voice language translation tool, which allows customers and Alorica agents to speak and hear each other in their own languages.
“This allows (Alorica representatives) to handle every call they receive,” said Rene Paiz, vice president of customer service. “I don’t have to hire someone from outside” just to find someone who speaks a specific language.
Alorica is not cutting jobs, however. It is still looking for more and more people who are comfortable with new technologies.
“We’re still actively hiring,” Paiz says. “We have a lot of work to do.”
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