Dukaan

History

2023: Lay off 90% of employees and replace them with an AI system

On July 10, 2023, the Indian startup Dukaan, specializing in e-commerce, announced the introduction of the Lina chatbot based on artificial intelligence. The emergence of this virtual assistant led to the dismissal of 90% of Dukaan's customer support staff due to the fact that AI is more effective in dealing with their duties.

The use of Lina was announced by the CEO and founder of Dukaan, Suumit Shah. According to him, this chatbot is "100 times smarter and 100 times cheaper" than ordinary employees. In particular, according to Shah, Lina can respond instantly to customer requests, while support workers provide the first answer an average of 1 minutes and 44 seconds after the question arrives. At the same time, the time for a complete solution to the problem was reduced from 2 hours 13 minutes to 3 minutes 12 seconds. Financial costs for customer support decreased by approximately 85%. Against this background, Dukaan cut 23 employees of the relevant unit.

It is 100 times smarter and 100 times cheaper. IT company laid off 90% of employees and replaced them with an AI system

For me, it was not difficult to replace the entire team with a chatbot, which acts instantly and which costs me about one hundredth of what I paid to the support staff, "Shah said.

Lina is based on the ChatGPT platform, trained on internal Dukaan data. According to the founder of the company, in the future, AI systems will be able to work side by side with people, increasing labor efficiency and reducing costs. However, Dukaan's decision to lay off support staff sparked a wave of concerns that other companies could follow the startup's lead. In India and the Philippines, millions of people work in the call centers of Western corporations. Replacing many of these workers with cheaper AI systems could undermine the economies of these countries.^[1]

Notes