AI is not up to the task of replacing humans in their jobs, but Rogers seems to be doing this anyway with apparent layoffs.
When Rogers bought Shaw back in 2023, the purchase was made with promises to make the company more competitive with lower prices, better customer service, better quality of service, and all of the other usual obviously BS promises a corporation makes when trying to be more monopolistic. So, it comes as very little surprise that Rogers immediately got to work cutting funding, layoffs, jacking up rates, price gouging, false advertising accusations, and, of course, more layoffs. In other words, the obvious ensued after Canada went from four players to three.
Of course, if you thought that the efforts to make the company terrible has slowed down, well, you’d be wrong. Reports are surfacing that says that waves of layoffs have continued all this time and, even more insulting, Rogers is apparently laying off parts of their workforce so it can replace those people with an absolutely awful AI. From the Globe and Mail:
Rogers Communications Inc. RCI-B-T has ended its contract with an external customer-service company, resulting in hundreds of job losses as the telecom giant embraces digital tools, according to two Toronto-based employment law firms.
Rogers previously outsourced some of its customer service roles to Foundever, a Luxembourg-headquartered company that provides call centres and other technical support, with about 150,000 employees globally.
“We’ve been hearing from dozens of Foundever employees who say they’re among roughly 900 people caught up in a major round of layoffs, reportedly sparked by Rogers pulling its contract and shifting to AI-powered chat support,” said Lior Samfiru, employment lawyer and co-founding partner at Samfiru Tumarkin LLP.
He said it is a mix of both short- and long-serving staff who are now out of a job.
Now, you might be thinking that it’s hard to shed a tear over these job losses given that they ere never given to Canadians in the first place and, instead, pushed to the dodgy field of outsourcing. The problem is, while outsourcing is bad, things can always get worse. According to the report, that’s exactly what is happening:
However, earlier this year, Rogers laid off customer-service staff related to its online chat option in multiple provinces, citing a reduction in demand for online chat services. The company has launched “Anna,” a virtual chatbot used to assist customers.
Mr. Samfiru said his firm is seeing a growing number of companies across Canada “leaning on automation to cut costs.”
So, if you are upset at calling a Rogers customer service line and getting someone that you can barely understand, try replacing that with an AI chatbot that doesn’t understand what you are telling it at all. Suddenly, outsourced employees that barely speak English doesn’t seem like as bad of a deal after all.
Now, I feel like I’m writing this same argument over and over again, but the thing you need to understand about generative AI is that it’s designed to produce content that looks like it was written or produced by a human being. It wasn’t designed to know the difference between truth and sarcasm and any displays of wisdom at all are more luck than anything else. I’ve written extensively about the people who decide to believe the myth that AI is exceeding human capabilities only to find out what a horrible mistake that thinking is.
Now, why is a whole company replacing a human workforce with an AI that is unlikely to be up to the job? Simply put, corporate heads have the thinking that if it’s “good enough”, then that is all you need. What’s more, cutting costs is a huge deal because C-Suite types generally consider the idea of hoarding as much money as humanly possible among themselves to be the ultimate goal in the end, meaning everything else suffers. If costs are cut, that will only aid in their ability to hoard even more money. So, even if the AI does horrible at its job, it doesn’t matter because this is a business with a monopolistic power over the Canadian internet and wireless sector. As a result, there’s no such thing as “voting with your wallet” because unless one of the two remaining players is operating in the area, you’re generally stuck with them in the first place.
What is even more problematic about this is that if Rogers is deploying AI to cut costs, that is only going to offer an incentive for the other two players, Bell and Telus, to follow suit in some vague notion of “remaining competitive”. So, there is going to be a push for these other companies to implement their own awful AI as well to worsen the customer experience. This so they can cut costs and continue their quest to hoard as much money as humanly possible at the top as well.
This, of course, is only going to lead to problems. It is going to open up companies to liability when these AI modules say something that is not reflective in the terms and conditions, open up further possibilities of false advertising claims, and an assortment of other problems as a result of whatever the AI happens to hallucinate to anyone auditing the services. I can only see the move to replace employees with AI backfiring on the company sooner or later. I can also see the corporation defending the inevitable backfiring by trying to proclaim that it was the AI’s fault and not the company, therefore, the company can’t be held liable only to see that argument shot down when the obvious counterargument pops out that it was the company that chose to deploy this AI in the first place. At any rate, I can only see this ending badly.
Still, if Rogers is continuing to push AI to replace humans even though it is obviously a bad idea, well, their funeral. It’ll give me much more material to write about afterwards as I add to the list of times people leaving their work to AI backfired spectacularly.
(Via @Fagstein)
