Dukaan lays off 90% staff for AI bot: It’s absolutely necessary, says CEO

E-commerce startup Dukaan has replaced 90 percent of its customer support team with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, founder and CEO Suumit Shah reported Tuesday.

He attributed the decision to prioritizing profitability, and said customer support costs fell by 85 percent while resolution time dropped from more than two hours to three minutes.

“We’ve had to lay off 90 percent of our support team because of this chatbot. Difficult? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely,” Shah wrote on Twitter.

Many Twitter users criticized the tweet, deeming it insensitive.

“Given the state of the economy, startups prioritize ‘profitability’ over striving to become ‘rhinos’, and so do we,” Shah added.

He detailed about Lina, an AI assistant who claimed to replace generic and delayed responses, as well as limited resources and poor communication. After 12 tweets, Shah said the company was hiring for multiple roles.

When a Twitter user asked him about help for laid-off employees, he asked them to look up his LinkedIn post, and he confirmed that it was a difficult decision.

As expected, ‘someone’ would be offended on behalf of ‘someone else’, so this response was ready: help ke bare mein jab Linkedin pe post karunga tab dekh lena mere dost, yahaan Twitter pe log ‘profitability’ dekhte hai ’empathy “Nahi,” Shah tweeted.

“Getting laid off is never a fun experience, so why the need to say it and be proud of it,” one Twitter user wrote.

The announcement comes after the Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajiv Chandrasekhar deemed any concerns about the threat of artificial intelligence to jobs as “nonsense”.