At a time when?many?tech stocks are riding high?on the?artificial intelligence?(AI) craze?and more and more companies are joining the AI push, a Bengaluru based?startup's founder has drawn ire?for a decision related to AI.
Founder and?CEO?of Bengaluru-based e-commerce firm Dukaan, Suumit Shah, is facing the anger of social media users?for a recent Twitter post 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 and crossed more than a million views, Twitter users slammed him for making such a harsh decision that would have an impact on many employees' lives.
The startup's 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.
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When asked by a Twitter user about the assistance provided to the laid-off staff, 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")."
But?social media users were not impressed by his explanation and decision.
One of the Twitter users who replied to the?startup's CEO's tweet mentioned, "The most heartless tweet I¡¯ve ever seen.@ojasvi_yadav?should be ashamed to be associated with you."
One more Twitter user expressed her anger at the post, saying, "How do I unread this?"??
Another user pointed out, "How do we also replace the customers with bots?"??
Another Twitter user slammed the CEO's decision, saying, "Dude, You disrupted the lives of 90% of your support team & you're celebrating it in public. You also likely destroyed your customer support (disprove with good CSAT for the bot) - all for a basic ChatGPT wrapper. ???¡á????¡á? This is a new low even for you."??
"The guy who laid off people over zoom did a much better job than whatever this is. We¡¯ve lost all empathy, have we?," said another user.