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My old boss swore AI would replace our whole support team by 2025 and he was dead wrong
Back in early 2023 my boss at a small software shop in Austin pulled us into a meeting and said he had run the numbers. He claimed a chatbot could handle 80 percent of our support tickets by the end of the year and we should all start learning to code. I admit I panicked and started doing free coding courses at night for like 3 months. Fast forward to now and the AI tool he bought does maybe 25 percent of the easy stuff, password resets and billing questions, and it still freaks out on anything weird. We actually hired two more people because customers got tired of yelling at a robot. So no, the layoffs never came, but I wasted a whole spring learning Python for nothing. I still use the AI for drafting replies though, so it was not a total loss. Did your boss ever make a big AI prediction that flopped this hard?
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palmer.henry14d ago
Was he really dead wrong though? Sounds like the bot handles a quarter of your tickets, which is a quarter you didn't have before. That's not nothing. Ten years ago you'd have needed a whole extra hire to cover password resets, and now a machine eats that for lunch. I get the frustration about the wasted Python, but calling the prediction a total flop feels like a stretch. The bosses always overshoot on the timeline, sure. The direction is usually still right.
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