That stood out to me too. This is effectively the investor class coercing use of AI, rather than how tech has worked in the past, driven by ground-up adoption.

There is another major reason to do it. Businesses are often in multi year contracts with call center solutions, and a lot of call center solutions have technical integrations with a business’ internal tooling.

Swapping out a solution requires time and effort for a lot of businesses. If you’re selling a business on an entirely new vendor, you have to have a sales team hunting for businesses that are at a contract renewal period, you have to lure them with professional services to help with implementation, etc.

Plenty of good, non-AI technologies out there that businesses are just slow or just don’t have the budget to adopt.

PE firms do that, VC wants a return of thier investment.

Why is that even legal? It doesnt benefit society in anyway, just hurts it by removing work places. I dont know how it works finically but at least it sounds like it could also be used to evade taxes with that debt bullshit. Is this using some loophole in existing law or is it something that doesnt have anything restricting it?

You mean... like this ? https://youtu.be/t-7mQhSZRgM

How easy will it be to fool the AI into getting the company in legal trouble? Oh well.

They don't care about the long run.

People with money will always find a way to run away from consequences.

Sure. But in the meantime, calls will get worse.

When VC and PE call a company or industry "mature" it means they don't see increasing revenue, only something to be sucked dry and sold for parts. To them, consistent revenue is worthless, it must be skyrocketing or nothing. If you want to see this in action right now, look what Broadcom is doing to VMWare. They also saw VMWare as a "mature company".

Isn't that what we call "Innovation" in our capitalist society?

You build a thing. Pour your blood sweat and tears into it. Some VC goon buys it during a downturn. They fire most of the staff. Strip the copper out of the walls. Make the service shittier and shittier until all that is left is its faltering brand recognition then sell it all for a bundle to the very next sucker they can?

The movie Outsourced (2006) didn't foretell AI, but it did a pretty good job foretelling how the offshoring trend was going to unfold.

Good luck calling your bank, social security, healthcare, DMV, IRS, etc with the obscure problems we all have, if they're a poorly trained chatbot

They're not going away, they're just going to be more persistent with their cold calling, and more infuriating with their call answering.

Having worked in a call center (doing survey research) during college, there are a lot of people employed by such places who really wouldn’t have many employment options anywhere else.

I remember saying, while there, that the entire industry would be replaced by AI in 10-15 years. They all scoffed, saying they had ways to get people to answer surveys that an AI wouldn’t be able to do. I told them they were being naive.

Here we are.

That said, I do worry about some of those people. Just because they were borderline unemployable doesn’t mean they were worthless.