ai-pocalypse You’ll be able to talk to a human when you need help for many years to come. A new Gartner study shows that fears about AI replacing humans with bots in call centers are unfounded, at least among Fortune 500 companies.
None of the biggest corporations reported that they were planning to replace everyone with bots by 2028 and the analysts noticed that several companies are rehiring staff after going all-in on AI too early. Only 11 percent of companies said that they planned to reduce headcount as a result of AI, while 54 percent said that they would maintain staffing and use AI to boost engagement.
“Let’s say you have the most advanced AI agent in the world, and you have all of the infrastructure stuff set up to be able to deploy the technology. Customers are still going to have issues that need to be handled by human agents,” Emily Potosky, senior director of research at Gartner told The Register.
“This is both in terms of just practicality, like super unique issues or super critical issues, but also just in terms of the emotional aspect. If you’ve been a victim of credit card fraud and you need to talk to someone, you probably want to talk to a human who can provide you with that reassurance.”
Part of the problem, she explained, is that successful AI implementation is not as simple as slapping a bot on the system and letting it do its thing. There’s an enormous amount of work that has to be done in the background. This includes linking in data management tools and knowledge bases to automated systems to avoid making the bot deployment useless or even counterproductive.
In some cases, companies that rushed to lay off staff to replace them with AI are rehiring them, she pointed out. Rushing into AI has caused reputational harm as customers grew frustrated with the technology’s limitations.
Not all jobs are going to be safe, and there will be some staff reductions, the report found. 22 percent of companies have stopped backfilling those who choose to leave, but conversely 32 percent are hiring more staff where they have specialized skills.
“The role of the customer service employee is going to look different,” Kathy Ross, senior director analyst at Gartner, told us. “They’re going to be tasked with more complex work, unique issue resolution, and they’re going to be building customer relationships that are going to support growth.”
The logical way forward, she opined, is that humans stay firmly in the loop, but AI is used to expand operations while people handle the tough stuff. This will mean some reskilling for employees, but the net result won’t be the jobs apocalypse that some are predicting.
“Even those companies that have very bullish projections against their headcount reductions are probably going to realize that it may be possible in the future, but not quite yet,” she told us. “So they need to back off these plans.”
Others certainly have. Last year Swedish fintech biz Klarna was an early adopter of AI and said it was planning to halve its workforce and replace staff with bots.
By May of this year it admitted it was rehiring staff because humans just don’t like talking to bots. ®