Kevin Surace says AI will replace tier-1 customer support, which mostly answers FAQs by phone or text. LLMs can do it faster and cheaper, eliminating millions of overseas jobs. Companies will cut support staff dramatically.
AI is going to quietly replace this, and he just said it aloud. Tier 1 customer support, I think, will be fully replaced using LLMs, essentially artificial intelligent-based, both chatbots and virtual agents. And that's because tier 1 customer support is a highly trained kind of thing. You have a set of FAQs, they're listening to you, they're typing, they're getting an answer on the screen, they're reporting it back from their eyes, right? So they're taking their ears, their eyes, and reporting back. It is quite easy to train a bot to do this. In fact, it's better. It'll be more accurate. It'll make less mistakes. And now we can have it be true human interaction even over the phone or online. And so for the millions of people that are in tier 1 customer support, mostly outside the US because they're mostly overseas, that task probably goes away. This is exciting. So this can impact every company. Your costs of customer support are high, I am sure, if I'm talking to the CEO right now. And you go, are you saying I can get rid of those 300 people? Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry for the people, but yes.
