Artificial intelligence may not take many jobs after all. It may just make workers more efficient

Irvine, California-based Alorica, which has customer service centers around the world, has introduced an artificial intelligence translation tool that allows customer service representatives to talk to customers who speak 200 different languages and 75 dialects. For example, an Alorica representative who speaks only Spanish can handle a complaint from a Cantonese-speaking customer in Hong Kong about a malfunctioning printer or an error on a bank statement. alorica doesn't need to hire a Cantonese-speaking representative. That's the power of artificial intelligence. There's also a potential threat: If chatbots can handle these jobs, maybe companies won't need as many employees, and maybe they'll even cut some jobs. But the thing is, Alorica isn't laying people off. It's still actively hiring. It's still actively hiring, and the experience of Alorica, as well as other companies including furniture retailer Ikea, suggests that AI may not be the job killer that many fear. Instead, the technology may be more like the breakthroughs of the past - the steam engine, electricity, the internet: that is, eliminating some jobs while creating others. And it could lead to a general increase in worker productivity, ultimately benefiting themselves, their employers, and the economy.

Artificial intelligence “will affect many, many jobs, and maybe every job will be indirectly affected in some way. But I don't think it will lead to mass unemployment. We've seen other major technological events in our history that didn't result in a significant rise in unemployment. Technology will destroy, but it will also create. New jobs will emerge. At its core, artificial intelligence is about enabling machines to perform tasks that were previously thought to require human intelligence to accomplish. Early versions of this technology have been around for decades, with Logic Theorist, a problem-solving computer program, appearing in the 1950s at what is now Carnegie Mellon University. More recently, we can think of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. Or IBM's chess computer Deep Blue, which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Artificial intelligence really came into the public eye in 2022, when OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that can hold conversations, write computer code, compose music, write papers and provide an endless stream of information. The arrival of generative AI has sparked concerns that chatbots will replace freelance writers, editors, coders, telemarketers, customer service representatives, paralegals, and more.

Artificial intelligence will eliminate many existing jobs, which will change the way many existing jobs operate. Deploying chatbots can also increase the productivity of workers, complementing their jobs rather than replacing them. Studies have found that employees who use chatbots are 14% more productive than their coworkers who don't use chatbots. They handled more calls and completed them faster. Employees with the least experience and skills saw the greatest increase in productivity, at 34%.

A customer service representative on an Alorica call had been struggling to get the information she needed to handle the call quickly. After Alorica trained her in the use of AI tools, her “handle time” (the time it takes to resolve a customer's incoming call) dropped from an average of 14 minutes per call to a little over 7 minutes in four months. Now, the company is starting to use its real-time speech-language translation tool, which allows customers and Alorica agents to talk and listen to each other in their own language. But Alorica isn't laying off employees. It continues to look for new employees, and more and more of them are comfortable with the new technology.