Dukaan CEO replaces 90% of customer support staff with AI chatbot, internet angry
Founder and CEO of e-commerce firm Dukaan, Suumit Shah, is facing the anger of social media users for a Twitter post on Tuesday in which he announced that his company has replaced 90% of its customer care crew with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
As the post began to gain traction, users slammed him for making such a harsh decision that would have an impact on many employees' lives.
The CEO tweeted a justification of his decision and added that this challenging move was done to achieve profitability. He further asserted that response times decreased from more than two hours to three minutes and that costs associated with customer support were reduced by 85%.
"We had to lay off 90 percent of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely," Shah tweeted.
"Given the state of the economy, startups are prioritising "profitability" over striving to become "unicorns", and so are we," Shah added.
But social media users were not impressed by his explanation.
When asked by a Twitter user about the assistance provided to the laid-off staff, Mr Shah said, "As expected, 'someone' will get offended on behalf of 'someone else', so I had this reply ready: Assistance ke bare mein jab Linkedin pe post karunga tab dekh lena mere dost, yahaan Twitter pe log "profitability" dekhte hai "sympathy" nahi (I will post about this on LinkedIn, here on Twitter people only look for "profitability" and not "sympathy")."
