[aurareturn]

Let's suppose you are a medium sized business. You've always wanted to provide top quality customer service but couldn't do it before because you'd need to hire 5 people to do it right. Instead, you strategically decided to not provide quality customer service and sell the product at a lower price than competitors. So you have no customer service person in the company. Service is bad. It limits growth. But it was strategic to not provide good service in order to gain an advantage somewhere else in the business.

But now, you can hire 1 customer service person, who could then use AI agents to provide the top quality customer service. Previously, you needed to hire 5 people, which wasn't worth it.

So you went from no customer service employee to 1.

I suspect that this is what will happen. Many companies will hire their first customer service person or more. Many big companies will layoff most of their customer service people. The net effect might actually increase total customer service employment.

I suspect that job openings for customer service employees will actually be higher than now but companies won't be able to find enough AI-skilled people to fill the job. We're going to read about how there are more job openings than ever but companies can't find the AI skillset they need. This is why I think people who adopt AI now, learn it, understand it, get good at it, will be in high demand.

[pydry]

Of the companies that I've worked with that made significant use of call centres they generally fall into three groups:

* Customer wants the human touch

* The company's systems were broken and the customer wouldnt have called at all if they could quickly and easily do what they wanted online.

* Customers are routinely furious and want to complain and/or understand and the company wants to brush them off.

AI doesnt help the first two, it only helps with deflection (what they call the last one).

[fastforwardius]

Or more likely - you are a large business.

You provide customer support but think it's just a cost center so you happily reduce workforce by 90% and count on AI to cover the workload.

The non-trivial cases end up with the remaining workforce. They get burned out, but luckily there is plenty of people looking for any job.

[truetraveller]

"Top customer service" and AI do not mix. People hate an AI response more than a late, real response.

[aurareturn]

Don't get lost in the customer service example. Focus on the idea instead which can be applied to many other professions.

People thought AI being better than a human at reading medical images would put radiologists out of a job. But instead, radiologists had more demand than ever because it made getting a scan more affordable, more accurate which led to more customer demand.

Same can happen for customer service. AI makes customer service cheaper, better, faster. More companies offer good customer service in order to stay competitive. More customers demand customer service because it's better now and they expect it since all companies big or small can afford quality customer service.

[senordevnyc]

I run a small SaaS business that both sells a super niche AI product to a non-technical audience of small businesses, and also is built and run by AIs, managed by me. I'm the only human in the mix.

I do all the sales and customer service myself, because it's a genuine selling point for my customers that they can talk to the owner if they have issues, and because these customers are the lifeblood of my company, and I want to stay as close to them and their needs as I can.

But it's still time-consuming.

On the customer service side, my next crack at automation will just be having an agent triage inbound requests, queuing up the actions that need to be taken in response (cancel account, upgrade, split team, whatever), and then giving me the whole thing for approval and replying to customer. That alone should easily cut my time spent on CS by 80%, while keeping a more personal touch. I should also note that some of the customer support burden will be lifted by having more self-serve options to do things, better docs, etc. But given that my customers are non-technical, there are always going to be some of them that just want to dash off a text or email because they hate tech and don't want to hassle with it.

On the sales side, I've thus far been 100% sales driven, but I'd like to introduce a self-serve signup flow that targets the 80% of customers who have simpler needs and could probably sign up on their own, and save the sales calls for bigger or more complicated deals.

[mikkupikku]

AI needn't respond, it can instead be used to sort the meaningless noise from the actionable complaints, where previously all would have been ignored. Raise only the issues that matter and can be addressed to the human.

[truetraveller]

This I can somewhat agree to. But how much time is saved vs just skimming a support request by an agent? Or, just having filters for "keywords" like "sales" / "purchase" to increase priority?

[chinathrow]

You sure could let the agent try to do the task and supervise it before sending of replies to customers. Similar to as to that I still check the code produced by an agent.

If you remove the human from the loop in customer service, you won't gain a thing.

[InfinityByTen]

Spot on! I hate being sucked into an "accountability sink", where delay/bad treatment/ tangential answers are ok (somehow acceptable) and justified because it's not personal, "it's just the process".

[gloxkiqcza]

In some ways AI sounds almost utopian. I theory it could redistribute manpower more evenly between small and large businesses, allowing them to compete more fairly and improving the efficiency of capitalism (the idealistic model, not the real world state). However, than you remember that the AI tech is currently almost fully in control by the big tech (and its next generation) and you have to ask whether they’ll be able to sabotage that improvement because they will do their worst for sure since liberating the market is not beneficial to them. Let’s hope that despite all odds and current trends we actually reach a state where AI is possible to run on-prem/locally and there are still SOTA models at least as open as they are today.

[aurareturn]

Whoever has compute, will have the power. This is why big tech is plowing $1t into data center capex in 2026.

Disclaimer: I'm an AI compute investor.

[ForHackernews]

Strongly dispute this. Compute very depreciates rapidly. Inference is cheaper than training. DeepSeek was the warning shot across their bow, but the big AI firms can't afford to change course without jeopardizing their "Wile E. Coyote off the cliff" economics.

LLM performance is already plateauing; models will get more efficient. Good-enough models will be deployed on chips, the same way H.264 is a good-enough video codec but used ubiquitously.

[karmakurtisaani]

More than your points, I'm very curious how these AI companies are going to turn profit without making using AI insanely expensive. Some time ago, each prompt was highly subsidized, I doubt the picture has changed much.

Edit: maybe the model efficiency you mentioned is the key, we'll see.

[ForHackernews]

I suspect they just won't. First-mover disadvantage is real for many markets. Everyone knows Amazon, but how many remember Kozmo.com?

My assumption is that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc will go bankrupt and eventually be subsumed into Microsoft/Google/ByteDance & friends. New entrants will take their pioneering work and sell inference for pennies on the dollars without investing in massive R&D spend.

[mmiliauskas]

Supposedly they could make money, if they wouldn't have to burn a lot on the research. There was an interview with Dario where he stated this and hinted to the fact that a monopoly would not have the research problem, and thus could start making money.

[lelanthran]

> Whoever has compute, will have the power.

Nonsense. There's a temporary shortage, but even with the shortage it's still a commodity.

[aurareturn]

No. There will never be an oversupply again. Tokens = work in the same way that humans = labor.

[lelanthran]

> No. There will never be an oversupply again. Tokens = work in the same way that humans = labor.

So? Electricity = work as well, and yet it's a commodity.

[guzfip]

> who could then use AI agents to provide the top quality customer service

I’m actually ROFL. Are you brain damaged? Or have you simply been in a coma over the past decade when businesses have outsourced their support to automation.

Hint: the result nearly universally has been closer to bottom quality support, if it even exits.