Ok let’s give a little bit of context. I will turn 40 yo in a couple of months and I’m a c++ software developer for more than 18 years. I enjoy to code, I enjoy to write “good” code, readable and so.
However since a few months, I become really afraid of the future of the job I like with the progress of artificial intelligence. Very often I don’t sleep at night because of this.
I fear that my job, while not completely disappearing, become a very boring job consisting in debugging code generated automatically, or that the job disappear.
For now, I’m not using AI, I have a few colleagues that do it but I do not want to because one, it remove a part of the coding I like and two I have the feeling that using it is cutting the branch I’m sit on, if you see what I mean. I fear that in a near future, ppl not using it will be fired because seen by the management as less productive…
Am I the only one feeling this way? I have the feeling all tech people are enthusiastic about AI.
I’m not worried about AI replacing employees
I’m worried about managers and bean counters being convinced that AI can replace emplpyees
It’ll be like outsourcing all over again. How many companies outsourced then walked back on it several years later and only hire in the US now? It could be really painful short term if that happens (if you consider severeal years to a decade short term).
Given the degree to which first-level customer service is required to stick to a script, I could see over half of call centers being replaced by LLMs over the next 10 years. The second level service might still need to be human, but I expect they could be an order of magnitude smaller than the first tier.
They’re supposed to be on script but customers veer off the script constantly. They would be extremely annoyed to be talking to AI. Not that it would stop some companies but it would be terrible customer service.
That’s what tier 2 service would be for. But the vast majority of calls are people wanting to execute a simple order or transaction, or ask a silly question they could have googled.
If your problem can be solved by a bot, and it means you can be done immediatelu and don’t need to be on hold for 20m+ waiting for t2 support, you’re going to prefer it.
Also, we’ve come a long way in just 2-3 years. It will be very difficult for us to talk about how good the experience will be in 5-10 years.
If your problem can be solved by a bot, then an old fashioned touch-tone phone menu would be an entirely sufficient solution, no “AI” needed.
If not, then plugging an LLM into your IVR will never be worth the expense since the customer will need to talk to a human anyway.
“AI” is a bubble. Sure, it might have some niche applications where its viable, but it’s heavily overpromised and due for disinvestment this year.
And yet, we don’t use touch-tone menus, bots that suck are already commonplace. An LLM bot could stand to dramatically improve the user experience, and would probably use the same resources that the current bots do.
Simple things like “I want to fill a prescription” or “I want to schedule a technician” or “do you have blah in stock” could be orchestrated by a bot that sounds human, and people would prefer that to traversing a directory tree for 10m.
I don’t even want to think about how someone would implement a customer facing inventory query using a touch-tone interface, let alone use that.
I fail to see how adding an LLM to an IVR could improve that situation. Keywords like “fill perscription”, “schedule technician”, and “do you have [blank] in stock” are already present and don’t need any kind of text generation to shunt a caller into the appropriate queue or run a query on a warehouse database.
Where, exactly, do you think an LLM could contribute other than, like, a computer generated bedtime story hotline or something?
Ok. I’m not trying to convince you of anything, nor am I the one responsible for this, I’m just very confident this will inevitably happen. Only time will tell.
I was a supervisor of a call center up until recently and yea, this is definitely coming. It’s was already to the point where they were arguing with me about hiring enough people because soon we’ll have an AI solution to take a lot of the calls. You can already see it in the chat bots coming out.
Do you know any examples of which companies that have done this? I’m not asking to be facetiois, just genuinely curious.
The one I work for did this years ago before I worked here. I already have enough personal info about myself out there so not gonna name the company lol I know I’ve seen that at other companies too.
Copilot is just so much faster than me at generating code that looks fancy and also manages to maximize the number of warnings and errors.
It’s fast and helpful for things that are a stack overflow post away from your code, but comes with a trust cost.
It often has subtle wrongness that you need to fix, and humans are really bad at that.
Example: yesterday GPT4 produced a fraction reduction function with bugs for me (it had a potential divide by zero, and 4/4 would reduce to 0/1). I asked it to create a scrolling number animation like a slot machine or counter and it just applied a 3d rotation on a loop to the text so it flipped around forever.
Gitclear found that lines of code written with LLMs/copilot had twice the rate of turnover (revision and rewrites) than human code.
It’s still useful, but it is a lower quality coder.
Yeah, stuff GPT writes tends to require lots of tweaking. Normally I just make it write some boring scaffolding type of code and then I’ll actually make it functional. Here are the variables, use that function, write a loop that does these tricks etc.
Occasionally, GPT also proposes using a new function I wasn’t aware of, but those moments are gamble though. It can be genuinely useful or it can end up being wild goose chase that leads nowhere and you end up using your old style regardless. If you know what you’re doing, you can easily evaluate if the proposal is worth trying out. If you’re stepping into unknown territory (which I do on a daily basis), you just can’t know for sure. It could be awesome or it could be a total waste of time.
That will happen. And if they’re wrong, they’ll crash and burn. That’s how tech bubbles burst.
Clearly my main concern… But after reading a lot of reinsuring comments, I’m more and more convinced that human will always be superior
This is their only retaliation for the fact that managers have already been replaced by git tools and CI.