WASHINGTON — Imagine a customer service that speaks your language, no matter what language you speak.
Alorica, an Irvine, California-based company with customer service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence-powered translation tool that enables agents to communicate with customers who speak 200 different languages and 75 dialects.
So, for example, an Alorica representative who only speaks Spanish can handle a complaint about a troublesome printer or an incorrect bank statement from a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong. Alorica wouldn’t have to hire a representative who speaks Cantonese.
Such is the power of AI. And, potentially, the threat: Maybe companies won’t need as many employees — and they’ll cut some jobs — if chatbots can handle the workload. But the point is, Alorica isn’t cutting jobs. It’s still hiring aggressively.
The experience at Alorica — and at other companies, including furniture retailer IKEA — suggests that AI might not turn out to be the job killer that many fear. Instead, the technology could be more like breakthroughs of the past — the steam engine, electricity, the internet: that is, eliminating some jobs and creating others. And probably making workers more productive overall, to the ultimate benefit of themselves, their employers, and the economy.
Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, said he thinks AI “is going to impact many, many jobs — maybe every job indirectly to some extent. But I don’t think it’s going to lead to, let’s say, mass unemployment. We’ve seen other major technological events in our history, and they didn’t lead to a big increase in unemployment. Technology destroys, but it also creates. There will be new jobs.”
At its core, artificial intelligence enables machines to perform tasks previously thought to require human intelligence. The technology has been around in early versions for decades, originating with a problem-solving computer program called Logic Theorist built 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 managed to defeat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
AI really burst into the public consciousness in 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, its generative AI tool that can hold conversations, write computer code, compose music, write essays, and deliver endless streams of information. The advent of generative AI has raised concerns that chatbots will replace freelance writers, editors, programmers, telemarketers, customer service representatives, paralegals, and more.
“AI is going to eliminate a lot of current jobs and it’s going to change the way a lot of current jobs work,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during a discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in May.
Yet the widespread assumption that AI chatbots will inevitably replace service workers, much as physical robots have taken over many factory and warehouse jobs, isn’t becoming a reality on a large scale — not yet, anyway. And maybe it never will.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers said last month that the ‘Little evidence that AI will have a negative impact on total employment.’ The advisers noted that history shows that technology typically makes companies more productive, accelerates economic growth and creates new types of jobs in unexpected ways.
They cited a study conducted this year by David Autor, a leading economist at MIT, which concluded that 60% of the jobs Americans had in 2018 didn’t even exist in 1940, but were created by technologies that came later.
The outplacement agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a company that tracks layoffs, says it hasn’t seen much evidence of layoffs that can be attributed to labor-saving AI.
“I don’t think we’ve seen companies say they’ve saved a lot of money or cut jobs that they don’t need because of this,” said Andy Challenger, who leads the company’s sales team. “That could happen in the future. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
At the same time, the fear that AI poses a serious threat to certain categories of jobs is not unfounded.
Consider Suumit Shah, an Indian entrepreneur who caused a stir last year by boasting that he replaced 90% of its customer service staff with a chatbot called Lina. The move at Shah’s company, Dukaan, which helps clients set up e-commerce sites, cut the response time for an inquiry from 1 minute and 44 seconds to “instant.” It also reduced the typical time it takes to resolve issues from more than two hours to just over three minutes.
“It’s all about AI’s ability to accurately process complex questions,” Shah said by email.
The cost of providing customer support fell by 85%, he said.
“Difficult? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,” Shah posted on X.
Dukaan has expanded its use of AI into sales and analytics. The tools, Shah said, 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 accuracy is on a whole new level.”
Researchers from Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and Imperial College Business School in London found in a study last year that the number of job openings for writers, programmers and artists dropped significantly within eight months of ChatGPT’s arrival.
A 2023 study by researchers from Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and New York University found that telemarketers and English and foreign language teachers were the jobs most exposed to ChatGPT-like language models. But exposure to AI doesn’t necessarily mean losing your job. AI can also do the backbreaking work, freeing up people to do more creative tasks.
For example, Swedish furniture retailer IKEA introduced a customer service chatbot in 2021 to handle simple queries. Instead of cutting jobs, IKEA retrained 8,500 customer service employees to perform tasks such as advising customers on interior design and handling complex customer conversations.
Chatbots can also be used to make employees more efficient, by supplementing their work rather than eliminating it. A study by Stanford University’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT’s Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond followed 5,200 customer service agents at a Fortune 500 company who used a generative AI-based assistant. The AI tool provided valuable suggestions for dealing with customers. It also provided links to relevant internal documents.
Those who used the chatbot, the study found, were 14 percent more productive than colleagues who didn’t. They handled more calls and wrapped them up faster. The biggest productivity gains — 34 percent — came from the least experienced, least skilled workers.
At an Alorica call center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a customer service representative struggled to access the information she needed to quickly handle calls. After Alorica trained her to use AI tools, her “handle time”—how long it takes to resolve customer calls—dropped from an average of 14 minutes per call to just over seven minutes in four months.
Over a six-month period, the AI tools helped a group of 850 Alorica representatives reduce their average handle time from just over eight minutes to six minutes. They can now handle 10 calls per hour instead of eight — an extra 16 calls in an eight-hour workday.
Alorica agents can use AI tools to quickly access information about the customers who call, such as checking their order history or determining if they’ve called before and hung up in frustration.
Imagine, said Mike Clifton, Alorica’s co-CEO, that a customer complains that she received the wrong product. The agent can click ‘replace’ and the product will be there tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else I can help you with? No?’ Click. Done. In thirty seconds.”
Now the company is starting to use the Real-time Voice Language Translation tool, which allows customers and Alorica agents to speak and listen to each other in their own language.
“This allows (Alorica representatives) to handle every call they get,” said Rene Paiz, a vice president of customer service. “I don’t have to go out and recruit” to find someone who speaks a specific language.
Yet Alorica is not cutting jobs. It continues to look for new people — increasingly people who are familiar with new technology.
“We’re still actively recruiting,” Paiz said. “There’s still a lot to be done.”
