Tech analyst Gartner predicts that one in 10 interactions with call center agents will be with bots within three years, thanks to advances is conversational artificial intelligence (AI), as well as labor shortages and high people costs. That's potentially bad news for call center workers but could represent savings for enterprises of about $80 billion in labor costs by 2026, according to Gartner. Gartner estimates there are around 17 million contact center agents worldwide today and those human agents can make up 95% of contact center costs. The projected savings in labor costs by 2026 are much larger than Gartner's current forecast that enterprises will spend about $1.99 billion on conversational AI solutions in 2022. Nonetheless, it projects that automated interactions with contact center agents will rise from 1.6% of all interactions today to 10% in 2026.

Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat said tens of thousands of the bank's U.S. call center workers could be replaced by cost-cutting A.I. With 209,000 workers worldwide, Citi (c) is under pressure to rein in its costs. The fourth-largest U.S. bank, it spends $8 billion a year on technology, the Financial Times reports, but this is the most explicit the CEO has been about how that investment might affect jobs. "When you think of data, A.I., raw digitization of changing processes, we still have tens of thousands of people in call centers, and we know when we can digitize those processes we not only radically change or improve the customer experience, it costs less to provide," Corbat told the FT. While the most common customer questions are easy for A.I. to handle, Citi has no plans to get rid of humans in its call centers altogether.

Instead of talking to customer service representatives who adhere to scripts in a robotic manner, soon we might be talking and chatting with customer service employees that are actual robots. While industry experts say that technology isn't quite there yet, the companies that run outsourced call centers, including offshore ones are already worried about having their jobs outsourced altogether to machines. Sure, robots assemble our cars and move Amazon fulfillment center shelves around . Some robots have even taken jobs in hotels. Yet it's jobs that require thinking and speaking that robots will go after next.