Trendspotting: Say Hello to the Chatbots

NewsWire: 4/13/21

• During the pandemic, companies have gone from using AI chatbots and online chat for customer service less than 10% of the time to 25% of the time. The rapid uptake of virtual customer service is stoking anew the long-running debate over automation and job losses. (Bloomberg)
• NH: During the pandemic, many industries accelerated their transition to virtual. That includes customer service. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Philippines, the call-center capital of the world. 
• Before Covid-19 hit, businesses with call centers in the Philippines used AI-powered bots or online chat to field customer inquiries less than 10% of the time. That’s now grown to 25% and could reach 35% by the end of the year. The increased use of chatbots is raising longstanding concerns about automation and potential job losses. (See “Future Job Automation Hugely Misunderstood.”) 
• There are two schools of thought here. The tech pessimists who are opposed to automation say it’s a job killer. Whenever a robot can a voice operator, the arithmetic is self-explanatory. A bot can respond to 10,000 questions in an hour. A good call-center rep can answer six. It's the steam drill versus John Henry all over again.
• Nonsense, say the tech optimists. No one any longer believes in the "lump of labor fallacy"--which posits that for every job taken by a machine there is one less left over for humans. To the contrary: For every job lost at a call center, a better job will be created somewhere else in the economy.
• More to the point, they argue, better jobs are likely to be created within the centers themselves as these business adapt by upgrading their workers' skills so they can supervise the bots and step in to field the questions that bots alone cannot answer. Many centers appear to be moving in just this direction, recasting their brand as providing superior quality service as well as cheaper flow through.
• Still, this industry isn’t alone in worrying about the effects of rapid office automation.
• Over the past year, white-collar firms have also hugely ramped up their use of “robotic process automation,” a catch-all term for the automation of higher-level symbolic tasks powered by ever-more sophisticated AI. This includes AI software that adaptively learns how to crunch routine numbers that are now being processed by an accountant, supply clerk, or HR analyst. In a 2020 Deloitte survey, fully 73% of corporate executives said they had implemented some form of intelligent automation, a 58% increase from 2019. Another 16% said they planned to do so within three years.
• The same argument rages here as well. The pessimists say vast numbers of white-collar professionals are getting summarily terminated. The optimists say these professionals should welcome any tool that can free them from their least-creative tasks--and that no one should settle for a job that can be entirely duplicated by several hundred lines of Python code.
• The one clear winner here? Automation firms. Sales of automation software are expected to grow by 20% this year, after increasing by 12% last year. Meanwhile, UiPath--the biggest stand-alone automation firm--was recently valued at $35 billion and plans to go public later this year.