Hard to tell what the actual value is here since “Online contractors” is a bit vague. AI coding is error prone and pretty limited. It’s basically a requirement to have someone to babysit it and studies done on this exact arrangement have shows that practically speaking far more time is wasted implementing AI in this arrangement than just having people do it.

The customer responses thing is fairly simple but is one of those cases where it works until it doesn’t. Small hallucinations by AI can mean serious liability for companies. At a bare minimum customers know they’re being replied to by a text generator and that results in feelings that you don’t value their patronage that much. Nobody liked getting pre-written responses written by humans. Having a bot generate a response without any input from an employee of your company is practically an insult.

When I say “AI can’t replace anyone’s job” I don’t mean that you physically can’t fire somebody and then turn on an AI, but that it is not and likely won’t ever be a worthwhile replacement. In your case you’ve “replaced people with AI” in the same sense as you can “replace” someone by firing them and not hiring a replacement at all. You save a few bucks, customer experience gets worse, there are more efficient ways to do that without investing in AI.

I’ve worked with a lot of companies that have tried to implement AI and I haven’t yet come across a success story. What little wins companies do get will disappear when the sweetheart pricing inevitably ends and the companies who are now relying on their AI have to shell out big time.