Uber has laid off approximately 10% of its customer service workforce as part of a restructuring of its support division and an accelerated push toward artificial intelligence-powered customer service tools.
The cuts, confirmed on Thursday, follow a broader pattern across the global technology and ride-hailing industry where companies are using AI to handle functions that previously required large teams of human agents.
The ride-hailing company has not specified the exact number of employees affected, but a 10% reduction in a customer service division of a company operating in over 70 countries represents a significant headcount reduction.
The move comes as Uber has been investing heavily in AI tools to handle routine customer queries, things like trip disputes, refund requests, lost items, and account issues. These are high-volume, repetitive interactions that AI systems can process faster and at a fraction of the cost of a human agent. For a company like Uber, which processes millions of trips daily and fields an enormous volume of support requests, the financial case for automation is straightforward.
Uber is not alone in this direction. Earlier this year, Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company, said its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. Duolingo cut contractor roles citing AI earlier in the year.
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Salesforce announced it would not hire new software engineers because AI was absorbing that work. The pattern is consistent: companies are identifying the parts of their workforce that handle structured, repeatable tasks and replacing them with AI systems that do not take breaks, do not need…
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Read Full Article by Mubarak Bankole at technext24.com
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