For now, AI is working as a good deflection in front of the workforce. I think that will continue and get a lot better over time, but will likely still just be a combination of deflection in the front, as well as enablement for agents by giving some good summary resources that may make responding faster.
Neither of those removes the workforce at scale in my opinion.
Also, AI is real far away from replacing more advanced support teams doing "tier 2" and "tier 3" support which require a lot more work outside of the email/chat thread.
+1, very much agree with this. AI-driven chatbots are a piece of the puzzle for many of our users -- they cover commonly asked questions and can deflect a lot of questions. But it’s still just a portion of the work (even if a majority of volume). For example, a lot of “hard” support questions involve jumping between systems and following complicated (often nonexistent) procedures, even aside from models that understand intent.
Also to be fair to our team, we do have a bunch of problems that we no longer think of as AI, but are still super algorithm-intensive: forecasting, modeling of queues, and schedule optimization.
Neither of those removes the workforce at scale in my opinion.
Also, AI is real far away from replacing more advanced support teams doing "tier 2" and "tier 3" support which require a lot more work outside of the email/chat thread.