Meet the AI chatbots replacing India’s call-center workers

At a startup office in the Indian city Bengaluru, developers are fine-tuning artificial-intelligence chatbots that talk and message like humans.

The company, LimeChat, has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries.

« Once you hire a LimeChat agent, you never have to hire again, » Nikhil Gupta, its 28-year-old co-founder, told Reuters.

In a February speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said « work does not disappear due to technology. Its nature changes and new types of jobs are created. »

Not everyone shares Modi’s confidence in India’s preparedness. Santosh Mehrotra, a former Indian official and professor, criticized the government for a lack of urgency in assessing AI’s effects on India’s young workforce. « There’s no game plan, » he said.

Megha S., 32, was earning $10,000 a year at a Bengaluru-based software solutions provider. She said she was laid off last month, just before India’s festive season, as the company moved to implement AI tools to review the quality of sales calls.

« The biggest impact is going to be on young students coming out of college, » said Pramod Bhasin, who in the 1990s established India’s first call center with 18 employees.

The promise and perils of AI are evident at The Media Ant. The Bengaluru-based advertising agency cut 40% of its workforce to about 100 over the past year and vacated space in another building to save on rent, said founder Samir Chaudhary.