Dukaan CEO Suumit Shah Dismisses Majority of Employees, Replaces Them with AI Chatbot, Inciting Outrage on Social Media
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a prominent topic this year, with advancements in the field making daily tasks more convenient. However, concerns about job security have also grown. According to a report by McKinsey in June 2023, AI is projected to automate a significant portion (60 to 70 percent) of employee workloads, prompting companies to quickly adopt AI technology. Suumit Shah, the founder of e-commerce platform Dukaan, recently caused outrage on Twitter when he disclosed that the platform had replaced 90 percent of its support staff positions.
Artificial intelligence replaces employees
In a Twitter post, Shah revealed that his company laid off 90 percent of its support staff and replaced them with Dukaan’s own AI assistant named Lina, reducing customer support costs by nearly 85 percent. Its aftermath? Shah claims response time went from 1 minute 44 seconds to instant, while resolution time fell from over 2 hours to less than 4 minutes.
After their success, Shah also revealed that they had introduced a platform called bot9.ai that allows any e-commerce company to create their own AI customer support chatbot. According to Shah, the AI chatbot can answer not only general questions but also user-specific queries.
Twitter’s response
The post drew the ire of Twitter as people slammed its insensitive nature. People also questioned whether the support staff received help from the company after the layoffs.
Twitter user @arnob1 asked: “As expected I couldn’t find any mention of the 90% of staff being made redundant. What help did they get?”
In response, Shah wrote: “As expected, ‘someone’ gets hurt for ‘someone else’, so I had this response ready: Assistance ke bare mein jab Linkedin pe post karunga tab dekh Lena mere dost, yahaan Twitter pe log “profitability” dekhte hai” sympathy” nahi.”
Another user @_glnarayanan commented: “Dude, you disrupted 90% of your support team’s life and celebrated it publicly. You probably destroyed customer support too (challenge the bot with a good CSAT) – all for a basic ChatGPT wrapper. This is a new low even for you.”
It seems that while people are open to AI innovation, they draw the line when it takes over people’s jobs.
