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I'm smiling wryly here because not every job in the world is writing code. So I can see AI making huge strides there and turning the world of work (for software people) upside-down.
Some other jobs will definitely get a lot more automated, but not so much. Trying to replace customer service agents with chatbots will not be "improved customer service, all problems solved immediately and correctly" but more "we don't have to pay real people to do this shit job anymore, and the customers have to accept it or lump it, they have no choice" money saving.
Other jobs? AI is one more tool but not world-changing.
In particular not every job in the world is writing code to solve a nearly fully specced problem in well trodded territory that only differs in minor ways from gazillion existing solutions. AI is basically the replacement for what we used to call "Java monkeys" - people with mediocre skills who were capable of writing basic code as long as they had a detailed spec and it didn't require any out of the box thinking.
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I feel like pundits have been saying AI will be able to replace customer support jobs for every single new LLM release, but I have never seen any implementation actually work out, even with half of YC and SF working 996 on building customer service AI wrappers and agentic AI wrappers.
While I don't really disagree in theory that this is something AI should be able to do eventually, I think the trifecta of cost (offshoring to Indians / Filipinos is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things compared to current AI), reliability/accountability (until an AI provider is willing to take liability for any mistakes the agent makes, even 1/100 or 1/500 fuck-ups can cause lots of problems at scale) and consumer preference (outside of the tech bubble anything that uses AI is pretty much universally loathed in the West) are pretty massive barriers to adoption even for the nominally most simple white collar job.
Yeah, the problem with customer service jobs is that in many cases they’re much harder to replace than a programmer because they both deal with the general public and often involve the ability to dispense (directly or indirectly) an organization’s money and extremely sensitive customer information in every interaction.
Even current generation models like Fable can be prompt engineered against the wishes of their creators relatively easily, often with almost laughable prompting of the narrative role playing “imagine im your sick grandma” variety that even an 80 IQ night shift call center worker obviously wouldn’t fall for (plus the human is scared of getting fired; the AI isn’t). A bank or insurance company or medical billing company or HR outsourcer has customer support workers who have full access to the most sensitive client data, a colossal risk for data leaks in financial terms that could dwarf replacing them with Claude. And even DoorDash doesn’t want an internet full of one simple trick techniques to trick the support LLM into giving you free food. All these things can be mitigated, of course, but less than perfectly.
Call centers are also pretty cheap, especially if as you note they’re in a third world country. You can hire a lot of Filipinos for one expensive San Francisco L5 or L6 programmer. I think it’s quite possible we see mass software engineer layoffs due to AI before the end of the customer support worker.
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Labs will try to automate all desk jobs with AI to some degree of success. And soon all knowledge workers will be confronted with the decision of whether or not to attempt to do their entire jobs through an AI prompt or not.
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We're very close to where I'd rather deal with a frontier model doing customer service than a person. The main rub is they probably won't serve us frontier models. I don't know how often you've actually dealt with customer service on out of distribution problems but it's not pretty, and the in distribution problems can basically be straight through processed already with a minimal ai wrapper.
This makes me miss Nordstrom's from the old days even more. They were legendary for their customer service. In every dealing with them you always knew they'd take care of any problem that comes up. You pay for that of course, but it's well worth it for some things.
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The problem with customer service (and a lot of other similar domains, actually) is that as the problem to be dealt with rather than the employer, the human bottleneck actually often worked in your favour. Having human employees working the phone line and wanting them to not quit or flame out and shoot up the office is the fundamental limit that makes it hard for Corporate to institute their ideal customer service policy, which is "trap any complainants in a Kafkaesque gaslighting nightmare until they give up". Mr. Claude has no limitations there, because he does not feel the "I am screwing over a fellow human being and making a mockery of the very concept of 'support'" qualia nor the "it sucks to be screamed at all day by people who hate me" ones.
Maybe you're working with scummier companies but it's not at all apparent to me that the goal of any company's customer support organization is anything other than supporting their customers, which they often do poorly because customer support is a cost center. Maybe if your modal interaction is trying to get a refund you aren't entitled to, but my biggest problem has always been when my interests and the company's basically align but the support agent doesn't know how to move some lever. The company doesn't want to pay a support worker or for tokens necessary to keep me in a kafka hell, nor do they want to piss me off as a customer to the point where I stop being a customer.
The vast majority of my customer service interactions has been with various transportation companies (airlines most frequently), who very much do appear to optimise for dodging refunds that their customers are in fact legally entitled to. There is a reason "pay us a third of the refund and we will take on the effort and risk of enforcing your statutory compensation claim against the airline" is a real business category that exists out there.
Never seen any US major airline try to withhold a statutory refund when asked for it directly. And they're sometimes quite generous with refunds or compensation even when you're not statutorily entitled to anything.
I guess I'm mostly talking about European airlines here. I guess the US generally has more of a "money is cheap" (when compared to the loyalty of a high-status customer?) attitude.
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