Don’t worry! Dreamforce is coming up and you get the chance to listen to Sundar Pichai and Marc Benioff wax poetic about how AI is transforming the workplace. -ahem- I mean how AI is being used to make you obsolete. Hurry now and get your conference pass for $2,299! What a screamin’ deal!
I honestly hope that every. single. company that fires real people for AI goes bankrupt in the most spectacular way. As a customer, I don’t want to deal with AI. Give me a person, even if they are slightly less efficient.
100% this! I had to call my kid’s school district recently. Spoke to a very nice and helpful person in the IT department about unlocking his account. Hardly any phone tree nonsense, and the issue got resolved in under 2 minutes. Even though it’s basically a government agency, it made me realize just how fucking shitty most corporate interactions are these days.
And not only that, think about it: the small interactions we have with other human beings can improve our mental health in micro-doses throughout the day.
I’ve had plenty of calls with humans where you can feel the smile on the other end, and in turn, I’m smiling during the call. And you hang up being a little happier than before the call. And the relationship with the company (or school, or dentist’s office) has improved because of how the call made me feel.
This won’t happen with AI. And having one that sounds or acts more human doesn’t change that fact.
Actually, it can only work to harm relationships between customers and businesses, because at best, you’re left feeling empty after a call (even if your issue was resolved).
At worst, you double-down on your anger because of the AI chatbot couldn’t help, and now you’ve got to waste more time finding answers. And since you’ve been completely disrespected by the company for even having the audacity to stick you with a chatbot, you harbour contempt for them.
I’ve lost so much respect for businesses that I’ve had no problem giving my money to in the past, only to now get email replies back from a chatbot when I’ve got an important question or issue.
Reminds me of an interaction I had with my ISP lately. I’m with an ISP who takes pride in using local tech support and I was calling to see if they could remove cgnat from my line. Dude knew exactly what I wanted, there was no language barrier, no AI jank, just a guy who also had his own homelab and knew why cgnat could be a problem. 5 minutes on the phone and the problem was solved. Glowing 10/10 feedback from me.
The customer support people I deal with are usually at least equally useless or worse. Maybe that’s not the case here but I doubt it. That’s probably also on the shoulders of the company who pays $5/hr and gives them 12 seconds to reply to support requests, but the point stands.
That’s probably because those companies are run by the same kind of dickhead as this Salesforce douchebag, a multi-billionaire, yet he can’t afford to pay and properly train his employees. That’s what we’re dealing with here. No resources for human customer support, and all the resources for AI. 🤷♂️
Costs a lot less to run an AI chatbot than it does to power a workforce full of humans. Doesn’t really matter why.
I agree. While eliminating jobs is a noble goal, AI just isn’t there yet to take over these customer support jobs.
Two weeks from now:
“Salesforce support now hiring!”
Literally the last paragraph of the article, lmao:
Salesforce follows buy-now-pay-later outfit Klarna in wanting to reduce headcount with AI agents. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski predicted he could cut 1,800 from the 3,800 people the company employs through AI investment. However, this spring, the company reportedly put more people back into customer service.
Buut, it’s an even when you lose you win deal (for the employer), what are the odds they’re hiring back people at lower wages with no seniority. Customer base loss of confidence is a next quarter problem.
I used to work for Salesforce even a decade ago. It was miserable.
It was a pretty good job back when I worked there, but then again I was on the operations team so we were pretty well looked after.
i’d laugh, but i don’t imagine anyone willingly chooses to work at salesforce
Just when you thought Salesforce couldn’t get any worse.
