Indian start-up lays off 90% staff for AI bot to focus on profitability
Dukaan, an Indian E-commerce startup, has laid off 90% of its customer support team for an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
The founder and CEO Sumit Shah informed on Tuesday that the decision was to prioritise profitability, reports various Indian media.
According to the founder, customer support costs were reduced by 85% while resolution time decreased from over two hours to three minutes.
We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot.
— Suumit Shah (@suumitshah) July 10, 2023
Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely.
The results?
Time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT!
Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s
Customer support costs reduced by ~85%
Here's how's we did it
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"We had to lay off 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely," Shah tweeted.
The decision has received criticism on Twitter for being insensitive and bold.
"Given the state of economy, startups are prioritizing "profitability" over striving to become "unicorns", and so are we," Shah added.
Lina, the AI assistant, helped replace generic and delayed responses, limited availability of resources, and poor communication.
However, soon after the announcement, Shah revealed that the company is hiring for multiple roles in r a series of threads.
The announcement comes after Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar deemed any concerns about AI threatening jobs as "nonsense".
