Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: How Will AI Impact Call Center Jobs in India?

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/06/22/197235...

How AI will reshape the future of work? The Washington Post looks at India's
$280 billion call-center and "business process outsourcing" industry, which
employs over 3 million people. 2023 saw the arrival of a real-time "accent-
altering software" - now used by at least 42,000 call center agents: Those
who use the software are engaging in "digital whitewashing," critics say,
which helps explain why the industry prefers the term "accent translation"
over "accent neutralization." But companies say it's delivering results:
happier customers, satisfied agents, faster calls. Many are not convinced.
Whatever short-term gains automation may offer to workers, they say, it will
ultimately eliminate far more jobs than it creates. They point to the quality
assurance process: When callers hear, "this call may be monitored," that now
usually refers to an AI system, not a human [which now can review all calls
for compliance and tone]... "AI is going to crush entry-level white-collar
hiring over the next 24 to 36 months," said Mark Serdar, who has spent his
career helping Fortune 500 companies expand their global workforce. "And it's
happening faster than most people realize...." Already, chatbots, or "virtual
agents," are handling basic tasks like password resets or balance updates. AI
systems are writing code, translating emails, onboarding patients, and
analyzing applications for credit cards, mortgages and insurance. The human
jobs are changing, too. AI "co-pilots" are providing call center agents with
instant answers and suggested scripts. At some companies, bots have started
handling the calls. There is no shortage of ominous predictions about the
implications for India's labor force. Within a year, there will only be a
"minimal" need for call centers, K Krithivasan, CEO of Indian IT company Tata
Consultancy Services, recently told the Financial Times. The Brookings
Institution found 86 percent of customer service tasks have "high automation
potential." More than a quarter of jobs in India have "high exposure" to AI,
the International Monetary Fund has warned. "There is a rapid wave coming,"
said Pratyush Kumar, co-founder of Sarvam, a leading Indian AI firm, which
recently helped a major insurance provider make 40 million automated phone
calls informing enrollees that their insurance program was expiring. He said
corporate clients are all asking him to help reduce headcount... While AI may
be phasing out certain jobs, its defenders say it is also creating different
kinds of opportunities. Teleperformance, along with hundreds of other
companies, has hired thousands of data annotators in India - many of them
women in small towns and rural areas - to label training images and videos
for AI systems. Prompt engineers, data scientists, AI trainers and speech
scientists are all newly in demand... At some firms, those who previously
worked in quality assurance have transitioned to performance coaching, said
[Sharath Narayana, co-founder of AI speech tools company Sanas], whose
previous firm, Observe.ai, also built QA software. Still, he admits, 10 to 20
percent of workers he observed "could not upskill at all" and were probably
let go. Even the most hopeful admit that workers who can't adapt will fall
behind. "It's like the industrial revolution," said Prithvijit Roy,
Accenture's former lead for its Global AI Hub. "Some will suffer." The
article also notes that while Indian universities produce over a million
engineering graduates each year, "placement rates are falling at leading IT
firms; salaries have stagnated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528