Quote:
Originally Posted by albionmoonlight
The thing is--chat AI does not need to become as good as a human. It just needs to be good enough once you factor in the cheap cost.
AI translation isn't as good as human translation. But it is cheap, so outside of certain contexts (court proceedings, etc.) that is what we use. The profession of translator does not really exist like it used to.
That's what will happen to a lot of jobs. You might be able to do your job better than the AI. But is the value your provide over the AI worth a decent-middle-class wage-and-benefits?
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This is the same theory as "if I outsource our call center to country X, is that worth the savings we gain?" There will be a lot of CEO's who jump at that sort of thing.
In one of my previous jobs, there was a customer that was outsourcing their IT that had previous all been in-house. They were given a menu with 4 choices and 4 prices: on-site cost $$$$, on-shore (call center in Kentucky) cost $$$, near-shore (call center in Costa Rica) cost $$, and off-shore (call center in India) cost $. They, of course, chose off-shore.
I worked quite a bit with that call center in India and they weren't necessarily bad technicians, but they had really high turnover and a hastily thrown together (6 months?) knowledge base was no substitute for the thousands of years of IT experience and stability they lost from all those on-site call center employees.
As an aside - remember when having an on-shore call center was viewed as a selling point? Get a Dell, talk to someone in the US! Apparently, that wasn't enough of a differentiator so the "race to the bottom" commenced. If a company was not going to get paid in tangible ways and the industry standard is to save cash and outsource, they all went that way. As long as you're "industry standard", you're not really penalized.
Back to the customer: What this meant is that, for instance, the sales people had to get better at IT, the administrative assistants had to get better at IT, the factory workers had to get better at IT. Instead of being able to spend, say, 5 minutes a month on the phone with IT, those people were going to spend 2 hours on the phone with IT. That's 2 hours less a month they're selling or making widgets or getting better at those things.
It was interesting viewing it through a gaming lens. There were a lot of customers who just started doing more of their own IT work and it felt like over the course of a year or two, they earned 15 skill points in IT but their widget making or sales networking went down 5 because they don't have as much time to devote to it. I'm sure that time and resource drain cost them sales but there was no real way to spreadsheet it. How are you going to track the time that if they had just spent 30 of those minutes with one of their customers, maybe they don't lose out to their competitor. Or the time that they lost sales because suddenly their 90 salesperson is only an 85 and the competitor's salesperson is still an 88. Maybe being on the phone with IT keeps them from reading that trade journal or academic article and it keeps an employee from coming up with the next product breakthrough. Or maybe their skill level dropped to 85 so that 88 they needed to hit that breakthrough is missed.
Anecdotally, we also found out from customers that there were a lot of things they never even bothered calling IT about after the transition. In some ways, that's a blessing - no one is calling in to try and dictate to IT how to do things ("my computer doesn't do X but if I complain loud enough, they'll make it happen even if there are reasons why they don't let me do X"). However, there were also a lot of people who just gave up (-10 modifier to morale). I heard from our customer management that they also had a decent increase in turnover. I don't think anyone went "my IT calls are so burdensome that I'm changing companies" - but it was more of a "this company doesn't feel like it used to, it's not a family anymore, they're making it so much harder for my to do my job so I'll go somewhere it's easier". Though, you don't make a change like outsourcing your IT because things are rosy at the company, you do it because you need to save money because something else isn't working.
I just went and looked up their stock price and number of employees and that company is in a better place than it was when I was there. They have developed new widgets to replace the old widgets that were not selling as well. Maybe that money saved from outsourcing IT (and other functions) was plowed into R&D and without those changes, the company would have gone out of business or (likely) been bought up by a competitor. Then again, they also work in a cyclical business and a boom-bust type business so sometimes you also just get lucky any none of this really matters.
SI