AI can be way off the mark in its answers to human queries. It can also be entertaining, such as in the recent headline-grabbing cases of DALL-E, which generates art based on user prompts, or ChatGPT, which similarly generates prose. It would be natural for contact center agents to view AI as a threat that could automate them right out of a paycheck. In live customer service, AI can handle many tasks. Those include agent assist, which plumbs knowledgebases for answers to customer questions via human prompts or automatically when listening to the conversation via speech recognition.

AI has always been looked at with suspicion and fear. Most of the sci-fi movies have a storyline where robots assist humans at the beginning and then gradually become evil and take over the human race once they gain emotional intelligence and feelings. The looming fear of AI replacing humans in almost all fields is present, thus creating resistance to the adoption of artificial intelligence and robotics. But is it possible in reality? Can AI and robots displace the jobs done by humans?

The last ten years have been a rough time for many bank employees in Spain. The country's lenders have laid off 89,500 workers on the back of narrowing margins, industry consolidation, mass closures of branches and gathering digitization. In 2008, when the financial crisis struck, Spain was home to some 278,000 banking professionals; today there are just 195,000. Another 3,000 redundancies are expected in the coming months, as Santander and Bankia plan to further streamline their businesses, pushing the total number of layoffs close to 95,000. The job losses are unlikely to end there. In fact, they could accelerate, especially if a potential new threat to traditional branch and front-office jobs materializes: artificial intelligence (AI).

NEW DELHI: The world of jobs is in a state of flux, thanks to rising adoption of artificial intelligence, and the jobs that are most vulnerable to this automation drive are software-IT and customer services, says a report. According to a report by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, customer service, software and IT and accounting jobs have very high automation potential. "Customer service jobs have the highest automation potential (64 per cent). This can be attributed to the fact that the processes in this function are repetitive and can be automated to a significant extent," the report said. Automation powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and bots has created a state of uneasiness among workers as machines and bots are being brought to outperform humans in various tasks.

It might be time for some of us in the customer service industry to start dusting off our resumes. They never take a break, never go on vacation, they don't even require benefits. They're not just after customer service jobs either, look out sales, marketing, and even HR recruitment: digital employees, often in the form of chatbots, have entered the workforce and there's no looking back. The market for customer support chatbots and automated messaging services is surging to all-time highs due to recent strides being made with machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as the prominent push into the space by the likes of Amazon and Facebook. Now, when I say that it may be time for customer service professionals to start dusting off their resumes, there's some debate as to why. Critics of chatbots argue that these technologies will replace live agents, sacrificing the human touch that is required when addressing complex customer inquiries, at the expense of the customer experience.