Here is an opinion spanning fifteen years covering call centers in India from then to now. The main business was customer service calls selling products for US companies using high school graduates in India.
Today, the noisy operations on the call center floor have been replaced by a quiet tapping on keyboards. Every query-from customers is now coming in text message. The calls are answered by a chatbot powered by AI. If the chatbot gets stuck, then the customer is handed over to a person, a person with a college degree. This person may have new titles, such as “digital conversation designer” or “voice conversation designers. This person is designing better responses for the chatbot.
What happened to all those high school grads?
The technology developed from the AI learning by the humans also expands the opportunity to improve India’s numeracy and literacy at whole new speed and scale.
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“In a nutshell, the U.S. and Indian middle classes were built on something
called the high-wage, middle-skilled job. In an A.I.-driven world, such jobs
are becoming extinct.”
This strikes me as a reward-looking observation. Is it not that what is “middle-skilled” is being redefined – at a pace that society is finding hard to adapt to?
I meant to say “rearward looking”