AI Shakes Up the Call Center Industry, but Humans Still Beat Clankers

Armen Kirakosian remembers the frustrations of his first job as a call center agent nearly 10 years ago: aggravated customers, endless searches through menus for information, and the handwritten notes he had to take for each call, Ken Sweet reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Roughly 3 million Americans work in call centers, and millions more do so around the world.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, the 29-year-old from Athens, Greece, no longer writes notes or clicks through countless menus.

Roughly 3 million Americans work in call centers, and millions more do so around the world, answering billions of inquiries each year about everything from broken iPhones to shoe orders.

Kirakosian works for TTEC, a company that provides third-party customer service lines in 22 countries for industries such as autos and banking that need extra capacity or have outsourced their operations.

Answering these calls can be thankless work. Roughly half of all customer service agents leave the job within a year, according to McKinsey, with stress and monotonous tasks among the main reasons.

Already, AI agents have taken over many routine call center duties. Some jobs have been lost, and forecasts about the future job market range from modest single-digit declines to predictions that as many as half of all call center positions could disappear over the next decade.

The drop likely won’t be as severe as the more dire predictions, however, because the industry still needs humans—perhaps with greater skills and training—as customer service problems become increasingly complex.

Some finance companies have already tested going all-in on AI for customer service, only to run into its limitations. Klarna, the Swedish buy-now, pay-later company, replaced its 700-person customer service department with chatbots and AI in 2023.

The results were mixed. While the company saved money, overall customer satisfaction declined. Earlier this year, Klarna rehired a small number of customer service employees, acknowledging that certain issues—such as identity theft—couldn’t be handled as effectively by AI as by a human.