The CEO role is mostly about doing what you are told by shareholders. Last thing you want to do is remove the final limitations of a conscience from the position. An AI for ceo’ing will be optimised to be evil. More evil than the average psychopathic/narcissistic/Machiavellian CEO.
edit: Downvoters might wanna learn to read more thoroughly. I’m saying CEOs have almost no conscience. I’m not saying they have more than a narc/psycho/machi level of conscience, I’m saying they have a tiny tiny scrap of it(rarely), which the AI will not have.
I feel like this is a growing sentiment everywhere I look these days. We used to get shunned for saying it and here you are getting upvoted. I guess it becomes more obvious.
I think due to our federated nature here we likely have a bit of an echo chamber effect where we are more likely to agree with each other. For starters you’re more likely to be using Lemmy if you understand tech.
Sharing these same thoughts on pretty much any platform with more active users, and I expect we’d see a lot of blood thirsty capitalists poor into the comments.
Even on Reddit, I noticed the overall sentiment towards capitalism shifting over the last decade or so. Subs like a boring dystopia and late stage capitalism were popular and, though there would often be supporters of capitalism chiming in, their numbers have dwindled.
So while I do think you’re right about there being a stronger bias here, that bias seems to be getting stronger everywhere.
Inequality is getting worse so it makes sense. I am pro capitalist myself but it needs checks and balances to make it work (ie monopoly busting, higher taxes, stronger social safety nets). Some of the checks have eroded, but they can be brought back, and I am waiting for evidence that a better system can sustainably exist.
Over time i have become convinced that most people are socialists at heart but have simply been indoctrinated to repress it.
I ask everyone around me why they won’t vote for the socialist party and their reasoning either ends at a dismissive “you can’t vote for socialists lmao, everyone knows that!”, or if they’re particularly politically minded they manage a whopping “But immigration policy!!”…
Side rant, but do you ever call in to support with a serious problem and they just by default treat you like a granny who doesnt know how to type in a wifi password? That whole process is so frustrating, and they never have the expertise to handle more sophisticated problems.
I think the only call I've had with someone who was able to quickly assess my tech-savviness was with an Apple Support manager. He was pretty awesome. My issue ended up being a bug in their OS, now resolved.
As someone who works in Level 2 and 3 Tech, the majority of people who do contact me are actual morons who legitimately think turning off and on their monitor is akin to rebooting their PC. I know that has been memed to death, but it's true. I've legitimately had to make a whole presentation on the various ways to restart a computer and present it to a group of about 20 people.
I have so many stories to the point where, if I don't treat everyone like it's their first time touching a computer, it will lead to the user getting pissed off because I didn't tell them that they had to left click on their mouse because they're so used to their phone being touch screen that they assumed that every screen was.
As a fellow level 3 tech you nailed it. We are constantly exposed to a massive amount of tech illiteracy on a daily basis, and have to clean up the messes these people make while trying to keep a smile on our face and be nice. It sucks even more because we get attitude from people who are complete morons with this stuff, blaming us for their mistakes and getting impatient while we cleanup their mess. We’re also lied to consistently about what they’ve done to cause an issue, so we also have trust issues and have to ask boneheaded questions because so many times the bone headed question is the answer.
Understandable when most people wouldn't have expertise. The real annoying thing is when you use live chat/email support and list everything you've tried and what you think the root of the problem is. Then they start the basic shit again, when you've already told them you have tried it all.
Ngl, most first level support I work with are not the brightest. There is a reason they are first level and on phones, and it's not because they are subject matter experts.
as a former tech support person I think the reason why its usually like that is that most of the people who call in are people don't know how to use a computer at least it was for the company I worked at
True for most doesn't mean true for everyone and not being able to switch once it is clear the person does know how to use the computer is really annoying.
I am not in denial and am fully aware that I don't know everything and can make mistakes. But that is a bit beyond 'knowing how to use a computer'.
But when I call about the squirrels chewing through the line for the third time and I have pictures of the chewed line I don't need to be told to restart my computer to make sure it isn't that first.
Some of that is from management being strict about following the procedures we have to make sure every step is followed or we get in trouble so even if someone seems knowledgable we have to treat them like they aren't
This. I was phone support for dial-up internet for the transition - when I started, we just did our best and frequently worked with customers at their level. I enjoyed that, the customers did too. I got promoted easily.
By the time our jobs were getting shipped overseas and we were all getting fired, they replaced that with a 'knowledge tree' everyone was supposed to follow regardless of our personal experience in order to make sure all customers got the exact same experience. Softened the blow. I never went back to tech support as a job.
(This was like twenty years ago. I imagine it's only gotten more stifling since then.)
Customer support is always woefully underfunded and horrifically overworked anyway… “our response times are bad but fuck you if you suggest we have the incorrect number of staff or that they aren’t correctly trained”.
and doesn’t receive any wages or sick leave, obviously.
Well, not exactly, but these AI response systems are not cheap to run, you either:
A: Need to use a third party which charges you a non-trivial amount of money per response
B: Host it yourself on the cloud, which charges you a non-trivial amount of money for computation costs
C: Host it yourself bare metal, which costs a VERY non-trivial amount of front for hardware and still costs you a nontrivial (but lower amount) monthly for electricity/maint
But yeah no… they are a shit tonne cheaper than people though. So it is that the horse is being replaced by the streetcar.
I love people cosplaying as CEOs who clearly love being called a CEO. In reality, they have a product that’s likely a clone of an existing better product and barely have any employees.
CEO, this year: Balance sheets look great! labor costs way down!
CEO, years out: Looks like profits are going down as people realize our products are shit., Better fire more people. Maybe I’ll sell off some assets too!
Support Staff costs money. When they do their job right, they cost more money (refunds, repairs, etc…) . They don’t make money. The only reason support even exists is to keep the PR around the company good. If a company is small enough (or it is soon to be non-existent), it could just get rid of support and just hire a good PR firm and no one would know the difference.
This isn’t entirely true, the core metric an effective support system optimizes for is LTV. A good support model can improve sentiment, as you said, but it can also improve brand loyalty (improving likelihood of repeat customers, WoM organic advertising, etc), improve funnel depth for existing customers (better product proficiency and confidence can lead to upsell purchases, lateral conversions, etc), and other more product-specific leading metrics that vary by product/company/industry.
Scripted chat bots like Drift can solve for some of these issues, but currently llm-driven support has huge problems with hallucinations and almost entirely lacks the ability to apply knowledge.
Depending on how complex this CEO’s products/business needs are, this will (most likely) be a colossal failure that will be expensive as hell to do by having to hire and train a whole new support team (or be bled dry paying for ‘enhancements’ to the llm).
If I had to guess it will go poorly. Having tried to use ChatGPT for parts of my job, it gets a lot subtly wrong. If I had just let it do my job, it would make a mess.
My job falls under IS, and in our monthly townhall we had a brief from the head of technology on our companies AI policy.
Our policy states we can only use approved AI systems, not sure which one but we have an account with one of the big ones. The main thing was, absolutely 100% of everything generated has to be reviewed and approved by a person before being used.
Basically any person using it will be on the hook as if they had created it themselves. They encouraged us to use it and explore where it can help, but made sure we knew we’d be responsible for the results.
Personally, I’d love to play around with it, as I do both graphics and programming as part of my job. The only issue I have is the language is so niche I doubt it’ll have enough data to generate anything, and I don’t want to feed proprietary code into an unsecured database to train it.
I’m sure in the next two years I’ll be using it for something.
Love when the AI assures me over and over that it can take context into account, and then it forgets the context in the same message as my request. Literally the same message. I separated the context and request with only a newline, and it forgot the context and gave me generic AI BS.
Pretty easy to see that this will lead to immediate short-term gains but long-term pain. I can’t tell you the amount of infinite loops I’ve found myself in with AI chat, even among the most simplistic questions.
Seriously. Worked in support call center before. Support staff and already running on scripts. I bet the CEO is probably right to have made those cuts. We should be seeing AI tools as another clear indication of the need for UBI, not desperately clinging to terrible jobs for human drudgery sake.
Yes! Support through call centers has been notoriously hard to get right. It requires a lot of employees, it is really hard to scale with demand and it can push customers away if it is not working well. And on top of this, the people working in them are among the least satisfied employees.
If this can be automated away somehow, everyone wins.
I’ll be honest, if AI works as promised, I’d rather deal with AI than most support staff.
I mean how many times have people flat out told me they’d do something and didn’t, lied to me, didn’t know their policy (or claimed they didn’t know) ignored the language on the website, or refused to do something, which is over turned once you get a manager or a different rep.
Add long wait times on phones, and support staff that seem to disappear on calls… I mean damn.
Yes part of this is training, support, and policies, but a big part of this is support is made to be intentionally unhelpful because they know the more support people have to go through the more likely they will just accept it and move on.
I don’t see how AI is going to solve any of that if the intended result is to make getting actual support as frustrating as possible. If anything adding AI to the mix will just make things even more frustrating–but simultaneously also harder to pin down why so it could be stopped.
AI won’t get the resolution of stuff wrong or not know how to do X. AI will be able to do almost every task faster and shouldn’t leave people on hold while they go check stuff or such.
AI will be consistent, and thus we’ll see exactly how these companies want to handle it.
My assumption is AI is a tier instead of a full replacement, instead of 100 customer service, have 10 who handle the hard problems AI didn’t solve, and AI triages/fixes the generic problems.
Half the time I call my cable company they reboot my modem and it fixes something… That should be just an automatic option. Hell the “I can’t see your modem, we are opening a ticket to find out if there’s an outage in your are” again could be done by AI, and likely faster.
Really I see AI as a tool, and yeah, companies aren’t going to use it well, and will continue to be shitty, but ultimately the problem is we need to stop doing business with shitty companies.
But following that up, we need more options, I have ONE fucking cable provider in my home, so I’m stuck with (Bag of )Cox
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