End of line. The first industry to be killed by Artificial Intelligence. “In the…

Artificial intelligence will lead to a “minimum” need for call centers within a year at most, with rapid advances in artificial intelligence set to change an entire industry, says the head of Indian IT firm Tata Consultancy Services, quoted by the FT.

K Krithivasan, managing director of TCS, told the Financial Times that while “we haven’t seen any job cuts” so far, the wider adoption of generative artificial intelligence among multinational customers will reshape the type of help desks for clients who have created mass jobs in countries such as India and the Philippines.

“Ideally, if you ask me, there should be very few call centers that have any calls at all,” he said. “We’re in a situation where technology should be able to predict an incoming call and then proactively address the customer’s pain point.”

He said chatbots will soon be able to analyze a customer’s transaction history and do much of the work done by call center agents. “That’s where we’re headed … . I don’t think we’re there today – maybe in a year or so,” he said.

The prospect of rapidly advancing generative artificial intelligence tools replacing many types of white-collar workers, including call center agents and software developers, has alarmed policymakers around the world.

In India – a global hub for back-office services – more than 5 million people work in IT and business process outsourcing, according to industry group Nasscom.

TCS, a branch of the Indian conglomerate Tata that works with multinationals to develop their IT systems, has more than 600,000 of its own employees and annual revenues of nearly $30 billion.