Will any Fortune 500 corporation mostly/entirely replace their customer service workforce with AI by 2026?
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If there are still human overseers that's fine. The corporation has to actually have a significant customer service branch.

Clarifications:

  • Fortune 500 company

  • "Replace" means the employee is replaced but their job is still being done. The customer experience needs to be largely the same (so replacing a call center with a flat FAQ on a website does not count)

  • By "customer service" I mean the service you get when you call (or email, or use the homebrew messaging service) the company. If a grocery chain replaces all of its cashiers that doesn't count. (If there is some jargon term for this I'm happy to update the question to include it)

    Oct 18, 1:41am: Will any major corporation mostly/entirely replace their customer service workforce with AI by 2026? → Will any Fortune 500 corporation mostly/entirely replace their customer service workforce with AI by 2026?

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This question is very vague: what counts as a major corporation, what counts as customer service (phone? in person? text-based?), what counts as AI (expert systems, deep networks, or is it just a catchall for "automation")?

@brp Major corporation: let's say anything in the Fortune 500.
Customer service: I specifically mean the phone/text variety of customer service that currently involves interacting with a human, e.g. Alice calls her bank to get them to send her a new debit card. In-person customer service (e.g. cashiers) are not included in this question.

AI: I mean any program that can reasonably do the job of the person it is replacing. If a company decides to scrap its customer service, put a FAQ on its website and deal with some customers being unhappy, that doesn't count. This is "replace" in the sense that the job still exists, its just being done by a different "employee". In practice that means some kind of large probably-multi-modal language model (unless something really weird happens, or there's some whole world of customer service jobs that I'm totally ignorant of)

@vluzko Thank you for the clarifications. Currently many Fortune 500 companies outsource their customer service hotlines. If the company with the contract automates away their customer service agents, would that count?

Also, what about a company with multiple lines of business, multiple tiers of service, or multiple service areas?

Ex. Car company offers a hotline for car emergencies, another hotline for car-related loan issues in the US, other hotlines to help customers find repairmen in every other country where they sell cars, and a boutique hotline for VIP customers to get personalized services. I'm assuming the VIP hotline doesn't count because only VIPs would know if it changed to AI, but what if an article comes out saying that Car company has automated its US hotlines, but not its UK hotlines (or vice-versa)?

@brp Automated away: yes that counts

No exceptions made for the company being split in any particular way. If it automates the US hotline and not the UK hotline and the former is >50% of the total labor market resolves YES.

If the company is some kind of shell then I will try to take into account all of its subsidiaries (but expect that information to be inaccessible to me)

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