AI: After Odisha TV’s Lisa, e-com startup hires Lina, sacks 90% of staff!
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Just six months after it jolted the world with its potential, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started impacting the economy in India.
On Monday, Odisha TV launched India’s first regional AI news anchor named “Lisa”, who can speak multiple languages, including Odia and English. The TV station plans to enhance Lisa’s proficiency and interactive skills to enable easier communication with others, the media reported.
It is not known yet how many employees would Lisa render redundant.
Now, an e-commerce startup, Dukaan, which hired an AI assistant, Lina, has laid off 90 percent of its staff for the AI bot.
The startup sacked its almost entire customer support team, the reports said on Tuesday, quoting the company’s founder-CEO Suumit Shah.
He attributed the reason for this drastic step to ‘prioritizing profitability.’ After sacking the staff, the customer support cost diminished by 85 percent while resolution time went down from over two hours to just three minutes, he said.
“We had to lay off 90 percent of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,” Shah tweeted.
“Given the state of the economy, startups are prioritizing “profitability” over striving to become “unicorns”, and so are we,” he added.
About the AI assistant, Shah said it replaced generic and delayed responses, as well as limited availability of resources and poor communication. After 12 tweets, Shah said the company hired the AI bot for multiple roles.
“As expected, ‘someone’ will get offended on behalf of ‘someone else’… What matters for many is profitability, not sympathy.”
Dukaan’s announcement came after Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar called as “nonsense” the concerns about AI threatening jobs.
