At a time when unemployment is rising, if the CEO of a company fires 90% of the staff and replaces them with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, it is natural for people to react. It is obvious that there will be criticism and it is happening.
Suumit Shah, the Co-Founder and CEO of 'Dukaan', has been in the limelight in the startup world of India. But now he is facing people's criticism for firing 90% of his staff.
Dukaan is a DIY platform which enables merchants with zero programming skills to set up their e-commerce store.
Covid-19 and the imposition of lockdown across India led small and medium-sized shopkeepers to shut their businesses. However, big companies still managed to keep their business afloat. It was small retailers whose businesses had to face rubbing.
Suumit created app Dukaan to help small shop owners during lockdown
To aid these retailers to come out of crises, Suumit Shah, a techie from Mumbai, decided to come up with a solution. With the help of his friend Subhash Choudhary, he created the app called Dukaan. Now Suumit Shah is famous as the Dukaan founder.
The app allows merchants to set up their business within 30 seconds. The motive behind launching this app was to help offline business owners to come online. Within 20 days of the launch, more than 1.5 lakh online stores were created on the app, 5 lakh products got listed, and more than 75K orders were placed through Dukaan App.
Decision to layoff staff was tough but necessary
Suumit tweeted: We had to layoff 90% of our support team because of this AI chatbot. He said it was a tough decision but it was absolutely necessary.
Customers are getting quicker response
He said after the replacement of staff with AI chatbot his customers are getting quicker response. He told time to first response went from 1m 44s to INSTANT! Resolution time went from 2h 13m to 3m 12s and customer support costs reduced by 85%
This has happened at a time when there is a debate about the fact that people's jobs are at risk due to artificial intelligence, especially in the service industry.
Suumit Shah has made several tweets in which he has written about the company's decision to use chatbots.
Company was struggling on customer support front: Suumit
Suumit Shah has also clarified that his company was struggling for a long time on the customer support front and he was trying to fix it.
Suumit Shah has also given information about how the bot and AI platform was created for customer support in such a short time.
He told that after this decision, the customers of the shop will have their own AI assistant. Customers say that the chatbot answers all kinds of questions accurately and quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment