Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer.
We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.
We saw that happening before LLM bots with pre-LLM chatbots, FAQs, support wizards, and even redirects to site-specific or web-wide search. If you save more money avoiding human support costs than you lose from dissatisfied customers, it's a win. Same for outsourcing support to low-wage countries. Same for LLM chatbots. It's not some seismic event, it's a gradual move from high quality bespoke output to low quality mass production, same as it ever was.
> We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer.
And this trend isn't new; a lot of investments into e.g. customer support is to need less support staff, for example through better self-service websites, chatbots / conversational interfaces / phone menus (these go back decades), or to reduce expenses by outsourcing call center work to low-wage countries. AI is another iteration, but gut feeling says they will need a lot of training/priming/coaching to not end up doing something other than their intended task (like Meta's AIs ending up having erotic chats with minors).
One of my projects was to replace the "contact" page of a power company with a wizard - basically, get the customers to check for known outages first, then check their own fuse boxes etc, before calling customer support.
Perhaps briefly. Companies tried this with offshoring support. Some really took a hit and had to bring it back. Some didn't though, so it's not all or nothing in the medium term. In the short term, most of the execs will buy into the hype and try it. I suspect the lower quality companies will use it, but the companies whose value is in their reputation for quality will continue to use people.
I have had AI support agents deflect my questions, but not resolve them. It is more companies ending customer support under the guise of automation than AI obsoleting the support workers.
Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer.
We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.