Founder and CEO of e-commerce firm Dukaan, Suumit Shah has been facing the ire of people on social media after he shared that his company has replaced 90% of its customer care staff with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
Dukaan is a DIY platform that allows merchants with zero programming experience to set up their own e-commerce store.
Criticism
Social media users criticized him for his harsh decision and his lack of empathy.
A Twitter user slammed the manner in which he announced the news of the layoffs:
“He is talking about laying off people with the same glee that a kid has after getting a double scoop of ice cream.”
Another pointed out the implications of AI replacing human employees:
“What about AI’s replacing businesses itself? We will soon live in the era of talking with machines only and living for machines. Human life has become machines, and now machines will be life itself soon by ordering us. Pity the employees and wish them a great future.”
CEO defends his decision
Shah justified his decision by saying he did it for the sake of profitability.
He said that response times reduced from more than two hours to three minutes and that costs associated with customer support were reduced by 85%.
“Given the state of the economy, startups are prioritising “profitability” over striving to become “unicorns”, and so are we,” he added.
Preferring AI over humans
Shah said that human customer support executives were mostly overqualified.
“Why would someone with a tech (or) product expertise work as a support agent?… It’s like – Lionel Messi doing a full time job at Decathlon, though the theory has some merit, but is ultimately flawed,” he wrote.
He also said that they tend to be fussy at work due to the dull and repetitive nature of the work.
This shows in the response time where with human support staff it took an average of 2 hours and 13 minutes to resolve an issue.
Providing support to laid off staff
A Twitter user asked the CEO about whether the company is providing any assistance to the 90% staff that were let go.
To this, he replied with a self-proclaimed ready made answer:
“As expected, ‘someone’ will get offended on behalf of ‘someone else’, so I had this reply ready: Assistance ke bare mein jab Linkedin pe post karunga tab dekh lena mere dost, yahaan Twitter pe log “profitability” dekhte hai “sympathy” nahi. Also – “it was tough decision.”
