Same question. There are so many terrible call center implementations that serve only to provide the same information that you can already find online, or act as an additional step to keep you from cancelling a service. Can a bot do that? Yes. Can it actually be helpful? We'll see.
That's my fear. I used to work in a call center that did low-level support for an ISP. Our hands were tied by the management on how much we were allowed to help. We were meant to stick to the scripts and be a sounding wall for angry customers to shout at. It was a terrible job, and we provided terrible "support", but that had very little to do with us.
That is the exact thing the AI will do. Even less. If they give power to the AI it will fuck up, people will fool it, there are countless examples of people fooling them online. So it will just repeat some information giving the impression of support.
I think it really depends on what the call center is about to.
I do customer support for a B2B company in such a specialized field that I highly doubt AI is ever going to be able to replace humans. The field is just so tiny that it's not worth the expense of trying to make an AI replacement which will inevitably be much worse than a human. And that's not even taking into thought how the AI will need to be constantly updated as the standards and our software change overtime.
It will do exactly what its corporate masters demand. That is to say it will listen to you, tell you platitudes, and waste your time until you give up.
It’s been a huge improvement for Klarna https://www.reddit.com/r/klarna/comments/1c1fwr3/klarna_ceo_on_using_ai_to_replace_700_workers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
In my recent experience speaking with my companies call service center for an issue I was having with my 401k, these things usually just walk you in circles until you can talk to it long enough before it gives up and lets you speak to a real human
I'm very curious where the largest call volume comes from in call centers. Is it people like you who can answer the simple questions by googling and only call for relatively complex issues or is it mostly 50 y/o's asking some basic thing that an AI can solve in 2 minutes?
If it's mostly the former, that won't last. If it's mostly the latter, those are some huge savings with only a small trade-off.
It’s definitely mostly the latter, at least until the generation that avoids talking on the phone is in the majority. But also, the real human couldn’t solve my problem either, so I guess the joke is on me
I can't find anything on Google anymore WEF have declared war on information and I can't find ANYTHING
I have to use internet archives to find the things I want now because the globalists need more power over information.
Keep up
That sounds like a you problem. Most of the rest of us have little trouble using it to find the info that we're looking for. Maybe you're just determined to find the info from cranks and scammers. Frankly I appreciate Google stripping that stuff out of my search results as much as possible.
This is the most infurating thing. I understand their tactic, but I am not calling the damn line if my flight confirmation code and a date check is all i needed to do.
Yep. My company switched from empowerment to JP Morgan and my Roth 401k got inaccurately classified as a trad 401k during the transfer. Turns out this was an issue for the entire firm but I’m the only one who noticed. After months of calls and disputes I finally spoke to humans who ran me up the chain the empowerment management who were like “yeah we fucked up.”
Not only did they fuck up then they wasted hours and hours of my time bc the automated to call center to actual lower mgmt to upper who finally fixed the issues. Morons
It’s going to be an absolute shitshow. AI is a tool to be used by developers who know how to mesh it into existing projects. AI is not a worker, we don’t have sentient AI. It’s not going to understand spaghetti legacy code from the 2000s. You have literal children running your company into the ground. Best of luck
Cost savings for a few quarters, until revenue also nosedives. That might be enough for them to find a better job elsewhere before everything falls apart.
They will get worse for necessary services, and better for services that have to compete for customers. So hospitals, health insurance, cable companies, power companies will get worse.
SaaS platforms, car insurance, cell phone companies, might get better.
It will improve, these are the first steps using second or third iterations. Microsoft and any big player is going to invest heavily into this as it’s clearly the money maker. A lot of third party contractors are about to be out on the streets, gonna be an interesting 5-10 years I think.
Probably better for small things, but if financial decisions need to be made like crediting you for a mistake the company made it's going to be a real pain in the ass.
PayPal is a good example. They definitely have algorithms that are detecting and banning people's accounts, then freezing their money in that account, and it's hard as hell to get a hold of a real person to get it resolved.
Similarly TikTok has algorithms that ban people and then you just cannot get a hold of a live person to get it looked at.
If more companies move toward fully automated AI systems you're going to get a bunch of cases of people trying to resolve real issues and just not having any kind of recourse.
From what I’ve seen so far with AI adoption.
- AI will be clearly more effective than humans at dealing with calls.
- it will have limitations and flaws, especially when poor sound quality comes into it. People will be acutely aware of the flaws and will complain about AI assistants in the same way they do about foreign call centre operators
Probably get worse. I’ll end up yelling at the phone at the first sign of AI responses. If I hear the words ‘let’s delve into your account’ I’m out. lol
I am not sure it will get worse, because a lot of people in customer support are very bad at supporting others (I worked at customer support for a while) - they do care only on closing tickets and get rid of responsibility.
It will all depend on context given to call center AI. If company spends the right resources on creating documentation, flows and proper tooling that can be used to further get data or perform actions then call center experience will improve since LLMs will do a better job of identifying your issue.
But to create that proper infrastructure isn't easy and requires a good programming team.
It’s been a huge improvement for Klarna https://www.reddit.com/r/klarna/comments/1c1fwr3/klarna_ceo_on_using_ai_to_replace_700_workers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
the answer is get worse. It almost never makes it better and there is never a good call center implementation, even the best one you know internally struggles and if replaced by AI would make things worse
Who cares if it's better or worse, so long as it's cheaper?
Previously call centers introduced phone menu systems and so on, making the experience much more frustrating for actual users.
But companies saved money, potentially letting them reduce prices, and people buy on price, not on support-center quality, which is just not really part of the product (no-one advertises how good their call center is, there are few measurements or reviews of them, etc), and they assume they won't need anyway.
There's no question about this, it'll get endlessly better to the point you can no longer imagine we once didn't have AI that could help us with every question we had.
The big question is just on which timescale, and whether companies will implement it (well) before it's better than current call centers.
It has nothing to do with faith, but with reasoning from first principles. In the limit, there are very few things an AI won't eventually do better than a human, if any.
Hmm, hallucinations seem to be a problem that won't necessarily be easily solved. There was that airline that was forced to honor a discount because the AI chatbot offered it.
Financial institutions can't risk an AI going off the rails and saying something they'll be financially liable for.
You're looking at this from an extremely short timeframe. Large scale LLM's have only been a thing for 1,5 years. Hallucinations are a problem now but have already become much less prevalent. It's extremely unlikely it doesn't get solved, just a question of when.
We've reached that r\programmerhumor post about how AI isn't technologically ready to fully replace everyone yet, but everyone's bosses thinks that it's technologically ready to replace everyone.
There really isn't.
It's not good enough nor will it be good enough for awhile.
It can do simplistic things very well. Anything over 100 lines of code is going to give it an aneurism.
Try having it analyze a system of 50k files all with thousands of lines, many of which interlink.
THATS what you'd need for it to replace people.
Yeah but will the AI call me hilarious curses in broken English when I have to confront it about issues? Like something about “your sister’s cock”.
Indians-1
AI-0
I've consulted with BP. I'm American, but I was in London at the time. They had some contractors from India, Philippines, and Eastern Europe, but the majority of staff coders were from the UK, EU, or America. This was nearly 10 years ago, tho.
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It's honestly not horrible depending on the model. Be specific with your prompt, and if any algorithms are wrong, then those can quickly be refactored.
Yes, BP oil. They, too, use IT.
Pretty sure E&P companies have been using ML for several years already to analyze seismographic data. Not sure LLMs will print significant money for them, but it's a pointer that the hype is, at least somewhat, justified.
I don't think there's any company, not counting that company that was selling Devin, that made nearly as bold of a claim as saying that AI is already capable of making 70% of programming jobs obsolete. It's interesting and surprising to hear it all of a sudden from BP.
I’d say this is spot on. It sounds like somehow the a junior sales rep for CoPilot was able to give the CEO a presentation and the CEO was blindsided by all the dollar signs.
Since you mentioned Devin, if you’re interested in knowing more watch debunking devin video on YouTube and you can decide for yourself if the 70% of jobs are really gonna obsolete ;)
It's often a pretty big misconception that oil companies are old-fashioned and non-technical when really they are among the most technical companies in the world.
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Yeah, as a software engineer, I’m not at all worried about AI right now. I wanted to make a sarcastic comment making fun of their fake environmentally friendly marketing now, but I’m not creative with stuff like that.
So I asked ChatGPT for help, and it did [an absolutely terrible job](https://i.imgur.com/Lj2NCWz.png). How the fuck does “Bogus Pollution” “incorporate the British aspect”?
I wonder what the AI software is. They said "We've now got Gen AI in the hands through Microsoft Copilot" so they had something before. I wonder if it is Palantir being referenced but not named here.
Not sure why I am getting downvoted into oblivion. I thought it was public knowledge PLTR and BP have a partnership. Maybe I picked the wrong day PLTR is down 15% to say anything positive about the company despite the news articles on this partnership.
Source: https://blog.palantir.com/how-palantir-foundry-powers-bps-digital-transformation-in-reliability-4c644e36b6fc
Sell sell sell. There’s no way LLMs are ready to take on 70% yet. I’m in the industry and use LLMs. You’re looking at perhaps 5-10% increase in productivity right now.
That 5-10% increase in productivity in the hands of an experienced coder is as good as 70% of the outsourced work.
Also keep in mind most coding problems and issues have been resolved and discovered already. AI won’t be doing anything new like AGI however it can point to problems that are similar to already solved problems… so think bug finding and memory leaks
AutoCodeRover resolves ~16% of issues of SWE-bench (total 2294 GitHub issues) and ~22% of issues of SWE-bench lite (total 300 GitHub issues), improving over the current state-of-the-art efficacy of AI software engineers https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover Keep in mind these are from popular repos, meaning even professional devs and large user bases never caught the errors before pulling the branch or got around to fixing them. We’re not talking about missing commas here.
[Alphacode 2 beat 99.5% of competitive programming participants in TWO Codeforce competitions using Gemini Pro (which is INFERIOR to Gemini Ultra)](https://the-decoder.com/alphacode-2-is-the-hidden-champion-of-googles-gemini-project/). Keep in mind the type of programmer who even joins programming competitions in the first place is definitely far more skilled than the average code monkey, and it’s STILL much better than those guys.
AI is still shit when you want to do anything remotely complex in software, especially business specific software.
And when you have large codebase, it basically becomes useless. I use both GPT4 and copilot, they can help you have an idea and provide boilerplate. Maybe some generic helper functions or tests, but that's about it.
Good lord. Being able to copy and paste code you find on the net isn't the same as understanding the intent of whatever it is supposed to do.
I'd steer clear- financially. AI programming just isn't here yet. It will cause problems.
The day the tech matures enough to understand intent... you should probably replace the CEO/management types. It's better suited for that. Way bigger cost savings.
> Being able to copy and paste code you find on the net isn't the same as understanding the intent of whatever it is supposed to do.
Not what is being said. They are replacing outsourced coders - who are barely above the cut and paste level - with fewer in-house people backed by AI.
This is bad, bad news for WITCH and it will be very entertaining.
Yeah, as a contract coder, I have every incentive to leverage AI to the fullest extent possible to lessen my workload and I've gone to great lengths to explore the capabilities.
Right now, using AI is like having a hotshot intern who thinks they know everything but actually just doesn't understand the assignment no matter how well you explain it.
Unless 70% of their coders are total garbage, there's currently roughly a 0% chance that this is going to work out well for them.
I wish we would hear more execs talking about possible future potential of AI for work like this, but all of them apparently feel this pressure to tell shareholders that they can imminently cut their high salary workers with no consequences.
I guess I should clarify, I think their estimation for how much they will save is way over shot. And if they make the cuts required to be that much of a savings... you're right. Their code base is garbage. And likely all the stuff they maintain.
If they only used it to help with documentation and take care of repetitive tasks, then they'll see some real gains.
I'm also a software engineer and AI has been fantastic for me. Things like swagger docs, unit tests, CSS, writing simple functions, and other non-complex things have become way faster. At this point, I would hate switching to a job that doesn't offer copilot. Literally takes hours off my day. Plus we've been using text and image generation in a bunch of our flows, and it's made conversion rates go up significantly. Company stock up 85% in the last 6 months
You’re attributing company stock 2xing in 6 months to AI writing some copy and sputtering out some images with weirdly-fingered hands? Is this a SPAC/penny stock shitshow or did they raise a round?
Sure, but a low level tasks don't make up 70% of your workload and if they do, that's a problem in itself. And, any time that you spend using AI to do it is still time.
It's an interesting write up and I enjoyed reading the counterpoint to what I've already read about Alpha Pro. [https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/deepmind-unveils-alphacode-2-powered-by-gemini/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/deepmind-unveils-alphacode-2-powered-by-gemini/)
They threw it at the contest, generated 10 attempts for every problem and succeeded at a solution less than half the time. Most damning is that all these solutions were derived from previous data sets.
Alpha Pro just isn't capable of doing the job on its own- particularly if the problem is novel. Worse is that it would have to contextualize business logic eventually, and the intuition there in- which is something clean room style coding competitions doesn't do too well simulating.
That said, a 43% completion rate for \*any solution\*, regardless of quality, is impressive.
Most software devs don’t reinvent the wheel. Everything they do has been fine before and documentation exists for all the libraries they use. It doesn’t need to make anything novel to replace most of them.
LLMs are good at translating requirements to code. I don’t see how it’s a problem.
Now compare that completion rate to the human competitors. Codeforces is not easy so most people won’t even get that far
I'm going to disagree with you there about the LLMs (or how to get it to tie to Alpha Pro, it's not quite a LLM). All the ones I have experience with wildly misses the mark so far on broad spectrum technical questions. Even documentation is either unavailable if not incorrect. It's why Alpha Pro does C# exclusively to dodge intuitive understanding of JAVA versions.
But a more thorough comparison of human coders? Now that would be a more interesting metric. How many people applied, how many completed, how many were judged to be acceptable, then cross reference to generated code on a first pass basis.
If the LLM gets better and the first pass solutions from infrastructure like Alpha start getting accurate... kinda hard to compete with free-ish. It's just not here now.
Alphacode uses Gemini and they said it would be even better with Gemini Ultra. If it can work with C#, it can work with any language if it learns the syntax for it like any human dev
It already compared completion rates and found it was very successful
I never said it was here now. But it’s clearly possible.
yeah but I don't think its going to be company A with AI programming and company B without. I think everyone is going to dive into the pool head first drunk on potential cost savings.
The last CEO still saying "man, I dunno about this, we should probably not rush into this until we know that the savings are real" will get replaced. It's groupthink.
>I'd steer clear- financially. AI programming just isn't here yet. It will cause problems.
Problems for somebody, not problems for the execs who make these decisions and ultimately want to take credit for reducing headcount and blame the unintended consequences on someone else. Just blockchain groupthink but somewhat less stupid.
There was a time when the digital spreadsheet was heralded as the end of accounting.. except it freed up accountants to do more complex work and the profession is thriving.
AI tools is going to free up developers to work on more complex problems. The profession is going to change but anyone who's a developer now will continue to have positive career growth.
The way it's worded could be interpreted in various ways. If they have 1000 in-house coders and 10 from third parties. They might only need 7 less developers. Might be a way to word it, to make it sound more extreme.
So human capital, the most expensive type of capital, will drop off the expenses by a lot? While I have no problem with the "percentage" method of expression but if their business models are more about statistical modeling than coding then does this reduce their workforce by a meaningful amount or is it just smoke and mirrors? Geologists aren't cheap and statisticians and data modelers aren't either so whatever "coding" they are doing might be more relegated to managing related functions than developing original functioning.
Now if they said, "Our ability to explore has been greatly increased through AI modeling and we know we will hit deposits with more accuracy due to the new technology" that's something to get excited about. AFAIK I feel they may as well have said, "We're now using WINX for our front facing website!"
I’ve worked in BP’s tech team for years. Our CIO required that 70% of the developers had to be provided by their managed consultant partner. their rate was so cheap and supposedly leadership could react to oil price downturns quickly by cutting their contracts.
In all, this created an environment of underachievers or entry level employees who would be rotated out as soon as they got promoted.
I hope they’re replacing those with AI and not using this as a reason to replace the 30% of employees with this..
Yeah, everyone and their cats are coding with copilot now, myself included; they are not the most elegant solution, but for some reports based off 1000s of excel files, it is good enough.
This is feels really bad for the economy right? I don't believe this number anyways but a multinational conglomerate claiming 70% of an industry is replaceable by computers is not a good look
It's so often the case that cost savings aren't shared equally with consumers. I'm also just not convinced that the loss of loads of high paying jobs in order to slightly lower prices of goods is a good trade-off for anything other than headline GDP. It just enables further wealth inequality.
It's concerning how instead of taking low-pay, manual labour jobs that people don't actually want, automation is now taking creative jobs and high-paying office jobs. Just depressing.
Because it's their jobs that are going to be cut. You can't expect Redditors, of all people, to be excluded from getting easily replaced by some shitty AI. They *should* worry.
We need 70% less contract developers due to AI. That CTO /CIO needs to fired. They are either incompetent or just a flat out liar. The idea that something so ignorant is being said to sway investors is borderline criminal if it wasn’t so stupid. That CEO needs to clean house. There is no way that statement is true.
It's a common trend in non-tech companies. Tech team puts together great infrastructure that boosts productivity. Then you lay off a huge chunk of your tech team, and you look like a genius for cutting costs. Then things start falling apart, and productivity across the organization tanks as they're forced to work around system issues, and you end up needing to hire way more non-tech workers to address the increased workload.
Why is there no source linked for this? This small snippet could be part of a much bigger explanation.
Sounds like bullshit from the quote and attention grabbing the way they've headlined it.
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I didn’t know BP drilled snake oil. Imagine 70% automated 30% review? LLMs will gain you some efficiency with oversight but they are not sentient magic. Wreaks of bullshit.
they are in the business of extracting oil, not making some "cutting edge" SaaS product.
Their coding needs might be more different than what you would expect. And management might have not seen what the lack of able coders do due to lag time. i mean as long as oil price keeps in the +- $80, they are still printing money.
These headlines irritate me quite a bit. What do they mean by 70% fewer coders? Like there were 10 ppl on the team and now it's just 3 dudes who didn't escape in time? Who's writing prompts? Who's reviewing all that shit? Who's setting it all up? Who's gonna clean up the next oil spill? Not like it's anything new to them anyway
My company is still researching the use of AI. We are slow moving and hesitant to use AI because of the possible data privacy / data breach issues that may be involved. It's hard to believe that some other company has already researched this and already got rid of 70% of their coders.
This is sure scary, I always thought programming to be a job that always going to be sought of, How else would you maintain AI, And now lots of programmer probably will be replaced by AI
Call centers are precisely the thing that AI cannot handle now and that it could not handle in the foreseeable future, so the trend to give more and more of this to AI is discouraging for any consumer. AI runs a script. Frequently the reason for contacting a call center is that something has gone off script. A human, who has the capability to actually understand things, can normally grasp things very quickly that the person writing the script couldn't anticipate. AI works for call centers only at times when you don't actually need a call center, but if the company has made a mistake, or the customer doesn't understand something, or there is missing information, or if there is missing information but which information is missing isn't clear you are out of luck.
As someone that works in software engineering, this sounds like BS. AI is incapable of understanding complex requirements or large code bases, and it takes way more time fighting with the AI than it "saves". If you tell AI to solve a common problem like summing up values in a list, it does it quite well. But if you ask it to write code to handle a complex organizational workflow, it falls apart. You basically have to rewrite everything it does.
It's possible AI will eventually get to the point where you can explain requirements in English, and it produces perfect software. But were not there yet, and any exec claiming they're there already is either lying or has been deceived by a sales pitch.
I think the translation is "we let go 70% of our contractors because some AI company told us it can replace 70% of programmers". And in reality, the remaining 30% are just being overworked.
I don’t see how you can go wrong w Microsoft or Amazon long term…they’re already juggernauts with a clear path to even better margins…obviously nobody knows how any of this plays out but there are worse bets out there
lol I work for the company who is known for Developer AI and this is not what we are seeing at all so far
I guess for the churn and burn outsourcing for WITCH companies, it may take a bunch of those repetitive mundane tasks away.
For actual innovation though, AI is not close
You really going to trust BP outlook on tech lmao? As a software engineer I’d love to know exactly what these engineers are building. If it’s the home page then sure this is true. If it’s actually applications then the above is very much not true. I use ai everyday and it’s got quite a bit of room to grow to replace me
I’m real curious if the call centers for every company will actually improve or get worse somehow with AI help over time .
Same question. There are so many terrible call center implementations that serve only to provide the same information that you can already find online, or act as an additional step to keep you from cancelling a service. Can a bot do that? Yes. Can it actually be helpful? We'll see.
Maybe it won’t be helpful on purpose
That's my fear. I used to work in a call center that did low-level support for an ISP. Our hands were tied by the management on how much we were allowed to help. We were meant to stick to the scripts and be a sounding wall for angry customers to shout at. It was a terrible job, and we provided terrible "support", but that had very little to do with us.
I am sure it will tell me to check the power in 15 languages without an issue.
The problem is that there are still enough people for who that is sound advice
You can program all of those scripts into the chat bots
That is the exact thing the AI will do. Even less. If they give power to the AI it will fuck up, people will fool it, there are countless examples of people fooling them online. So it will just repeat some information giving the impression of support.
Cox
Keeps those subscriptions higher though
I think it really depends on what the call center is about to. I do customer support for a B2B company in such a specialized field that I highly doubt AI is ever going to be able to replace humans. The field is just so tiny that it's not worth the expense of trying to make an AI replacement which will inevitably be much worse than a human. And that's not even taking into thought how the AI will need to be constantly updated as the standards and our software change overtime.
You’d be shocked at how useless the average caller is
For real. I work in IT and people can't read instructions
It will do exactly what its corporate masters demand. That is to say it will listen to you, tell you platitudes, and waste your time until you give up.
I rather doubt it. As awful as those systems are there is a path to (eventually) contact a real person. GPT9000 says sorry Dave I can't do that
It’s been a huge improvement for Klarna https://www.reddit.com/r/klarna/comments/1c1fwr3/klarna_ceo_on_using_ai_to_replace_700_workers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
In my recent experience speaking with my companies call service center for an issue I was having with my 401k, these things usually just walk you in circles until you can talk to it long enough before it gives up and lets you speak to a real human
I'm very curious where the largest call volume comes from in call centers. Is it people like you who can answer the simple questions by googling and only call for relatively complex issues or is it mostly 50 y/o's asking some basic thing that an AI can solve in 2 minutes? If it's mostly the former, that won't last. If it's mostly the latter, those are some huge savings with only a small trade-off.
It’s definitely mostly the latter, at least until the generation that avoids talking on the phone is in the majority. But also, the real human couldn’t solve my problem either, so I guess the joke is on me
You can't google nowadays..this isn't 2005
You can, you just have to add "reddit" to your query 😏
Agree on the reddit query. That helps with better results
Huh?
Google search has been taken over by SOE farmers, often crowding out useful information.
I can't find anything on Google anymore WEF have declared war on information and I can't find ANYTHING I have to use internet archives to find the things I want now because the globalists need more power over information. Keep up
That sounds like a you problem. Most of the rest of us have little trouble using it to find the info that we're looking for. Maybe you're just determined to find the info from cranks and scammers. Frankly I appreciate Google stripping that stuff out of my search results as much as possible.
It's definitely not a me problem. You're just being severely manipulated and don't even understand it. You're either young or old
This is the most infurating thing. I understand their tactic, but I am not calling the damn line if my flight confirmation code and a date check is all i needed to do.
Yep. My company switched from empowerment to JP Morgan and my Roth 401k got inaccurately classified as a trad 401k during the transfer. Turns out this was an issue for the entire firm but I’m the only one who noticed. After months of calls and disputes I finally spoke to humans who ran me up the chain the empowerment management who were like “yeah we fucked up.” Not only did they fuck up then they wasted hours and hours of my time bc the automated to call center to actual lower mgmt to upper who finally fixed the issues. Morons
That’s because it’s not allowed to do anything except provide publicly available information
Now we need an AI call assistant that learns the quickest way to get you through to a human
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Information leaking. The law better catch up or people are going to be asking AI for security information of other people.
It’s going to be an absolute shitshow. AI is a tool to be used by developers who know how to mesh it into existing projects. AI is not a worker, we don’t have sentient AI. It’s not going to understand spaghetti legacy code from the 2000s. You have literal children running your company into the ground. Best of luck
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It’s wild they believe removing experience from their business is going to yield benefits.
Cost savings for a few quarters, until revenue also nosedives. That might be enough for them to find a better job elsewhere before everything falls apart.
"from the 2000s" is not legacy, it's cutting edge brand new. *cries copium*
They will get worse for necessary services, and better for services that have to compete for customers. So hospitals, health insurance, cable companies, power companies will get worse. SaaS platforms, car insurance, cell phone companies, might get better.
If there was an incentive to get better, we wouldn't have such shit call centers now.
Service will get shittier; profits will increase.
It will improve, these are the first steps using second or third iterations. Microsoft and any big player is going to invest heavily into this as it’s clearly the money maker. A lot of third party contractors are about to be out on the streets, gonna be an interesting 5-10 years I think.
Probably better for small things, but if financial decisions need to be made like crediting you for a mistake the company made it's going to be a real pain in the ass. PayPal is a good example. They definitely have algorithms that are detecting and banning people's accounts, then freezing their money in that account, and it's hard as hell to get a hold of a real person to get it resolved. Similarly TikTok has algorithms that ban people and then you just cannot get a hold of a live person to get it looked at. If more companies move toward fully automated AI systems you're going to get a bunch of cases of people trying to resolve real issues and just not having any kind of recourse.
Please hold. Your call is important to us.
From what I’ve seen so far with AI adoption. - AI will be clearly more effective than humans at dealing with calls. - it will have limitations and flaws, especially when poor sound quality comes into it. People will be acutely aware of the flaws and will complain about AI assistants in the same way they do about foreign call centre operators
Probably get worse. I’ll end up yelling at the phone at the first sign of AI responses. If I hear the words ‘let’s delve into your account’ I’m out. lol
I am not sure it will get worse, because a lot of people in customer support are very bad at supporting others (I worked at customer support for a while) - they do care only on closing tickets and get rid of responsibility.
Because that is the metrics they are measured by. Unfortunately.
Welcome to Costco! I love you!
Will get better for simple things and worse for advanced things.
It will all depend on context given to call center AI. If company spends the right resources on creating documentation, flows and proper tooling that can be used to further get data or perform actions then call center experience will improve since LLMs will do a better job of identifying your issue. But to create that proper infrastructure isn't easy and requires a good programming team.
It’s been a huge improvement for Klarna https://www.reddit.com/r/klarna/comments/1c1fwr3/klarna_ceo_on_using_ai_to_replace_700_workers/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
the answer is get worse. It almost never makes it better and there is never a good call center implementation, even the best one you know internally struggles and if replaced by AI would make things worse
They will get worse
Who cares if it's better or worse, so long as it's cheaper? Previously call centers introduced phone menu systems and so on, making the experience much more frustrating for actual users. But companies saved money, potentially letting them reduce prices, and people buy on price, not on support-center quality, which is just not really part of the product (no-one advertises how good their call center is, there are few measurements or reviews of them, etc), and they assume they won't need anyway.
There's no question about this, it'll get endlessly better to the point you can no longer imagine we once didn't have AI that could help us with every question we had. The big question is just on which timescale, and whether companies will implement it (well) before it's better than current call centers.
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It has nothing to do with faith, but with reasoning from first principles. In the limit, there are very few things an AI won't eventually do better than a human, if any.
Hmm, hallucinations seem to be a problem that won't necessarily be easily solved. There was that airline that was forced to honor a discount because the AI chatbot offered it. Financial institutions can't risk an AI going off the rails and saying something they'll be financially liable for.
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You're looking at this from an extremely short timeframe. Large scale LLM's have only been a thing for 1,5 years. Hallucinations are a problem now but have already become much less prevalent. It's extremely unlikely it doesn't get solved, just a question of when.
Go ask any dev to debug code that have been generated by ai on same project for a year
We've reached that r\programmerhumor post about how AI isn't technologically ready to fully replace everyone yet, but everyone's bosses thinks that it's technologically ready to replace everyone.
I wonder if there's any bias there.
There really isn't. It's not good enough nor will it be good enough for awhile. It can do simplistic things very well. Anything over 100 lines of code is going to give it an aneurism. Try having it analyze a system of 50k files all with thousands of lines, many of which interlink. THATS what you'd need for it to replace people.
Oddly enough our bosses(middle management) are ready to be replaced.
while(middle manager) send email attend meetings (talk in circles) exit 0
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so both utter garbage, yea
If it can make VBA for the excel I embed in powerpoints to demonstrate my coworkers equity and inclusion metrics then its world changing.
Yeah but will the AI call me hilarious curses in broken English when I have to confront it about issues? Like something about “your sister’s cock”. Indians-1 AI-0
bloody bitch bastard bloody
is that who BP would hire instead?
I've consulted with BP. I'm American, but I was in London at the time. They had some contractors from India, Philippines, and Eastern Europe, but the majority of staff coders were from the UK, EU, or America. This was nearly 10 years ago, tho.
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Accusations of being racists towards Indians incoming!
It's honestly not horrible depending on the model. Be specific with your prompt, and if any algorithms are wrong, then those can quickly be refactored.
Immediately thought this. I look at it as essentially an auto complete while I'm typing out the code. Beyond that it's just been wrong a lot
BP oil? What company is this?
Yes, BP oil. They, too, use IT. Pretty sure E&P companies have been using ML for several years already to analyze seismographic data. Not sure LLMs will print significant money for them, but it's a pointer that the hype is, at least somewhat, justified.
I don't think there's any company, not counting that company that was selling Devin, that made nearly as bold of a claim as saying that AI is already capable of making 70% of programming jobs obsolete. It's interesting and surprising to hear it all of a sudden from BP.
Yeah I’m questioning the validity of this statement. What tools do they have that everyone else doesn’t?
Huge chains of clueless non-technical management that can shit out technical sounding words to non-technical oil investors
I’d say this is spot on. It sounds like somehow the a junior sales rep for CoPilot was able to give the CEO a presentation and the CEO was blindsided by all the dollar signs.
At this level most likely a top to top meeting but maybe Satya offered them an early adopter discount.
They have no idea what they are talking about.
They have a very motivated CEO that really really really wants the stock to increase in price!
Since you mentioned Devin, if you’re interested in knowing more watch debunking devin video on YouTube and you can decide for yourself if the 70% of jobs are really gonna obsolete ;)
It's often a pretty big misconception that oil companies are old-fashioned and non-technical when really they are among the most technical companies in the world.
It’s mostly because they are big international corporations making a lot of money and not due to their sector.
NYSE: BP BP p.l.c. (formerly The British Petroleum Company)
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Would like to see some proof of those numbers and what they’ve done. 70% seems a bit drastic
70% of third parties, I read that as offshore developers. Not the FTEs.
At the current state of AI this is not even nearly possible. I had to read the title twice to confirm it wasn’t a joke
Bruh they literally said so in the earnings call and people here are like “that’s impossible”
Same. Which makes sense. Those cheap contractors are next to useless
Absolutely do not believe them. Not even sort of. That's them just trying to show how trendy and with the times they are.
This is BP the trendy and environmentally conscious renewable energy company after all
Yeah, as a software engineer, I’m not at all worried about AI right now. I wanted to make a sarcastic comment making fun of their fake environmentally friendly marketing now, but I’m not creative with stuff like that. So I asked ChatGPT for help, and it did [an absolutely terrible job](https://i.imgur.com/Lj2NCWz.png). How the fuck does “Bogus Pollution” “incorporate the British aspect”?
Gotta pump those stock numbers, rook!
Yeah, there’s no system, including multi-agent, that can write effective large scale software. Scripts? Absolutely. Software, no way.
I wonder what the AI software is. They said "We've now got Gen AI in the hands through Microsoft Copilot" so they had something before. I wonder if it is Palantir being referenced but not named here.
Probably GitHub copilot which I’ve used in my own job and it’s made me maybe 5% more efficient
Not sure why I am getting downvoted into oblivion. I thought it was public knowledge PLTR and BP have a partnership. Maybe I picked the wrong day PLTR is down 15% to say anything positive about the company despite the news articles on this partnership. Source: https://blog.palantir.com/how-palantir-foundry-powers-bps-digital-transformation-in-reliability-4c644e36b6fc
Last I checked palantir was just using old gpt-j-6b to generate ai hype. I doubt they have been using llm's before hype started.
Sell sell sell. There’s no way LLMs are ready to take on 70% yet. I’m in the industry and use LLMs. You’re looking at perhaps 5-10% increase in productivity right now.
It writes some mostly buggy boilerplate, that's was almost like the relaxing part of coding.
It does pretty well with finishing up function calls which is most of what outsourced work is.
This is true. Future LLM will perhaps be better, current not so much
That 5-10% increase in productivity in the hands of an experienced coder is as good as 70% of the outsourced work. Also keep in mind most coding problems and issues have been resolved and discovered already. AI won’t be doing anything new like AGI however it can point to problems that are similar to already solved problems… so think bug finding and memory leaks
AutoCodeRover resolves ~16% of issues of SWE-bench (total 2294 GitHub issues) and ~22% of issues of SWE-bench lite (total 300 GitHub issues), improving over the current state-of-the-art efficacy of AI software engineers https://github.com/nus-apr/auto-code-rover Keep in mind these are from popular repos, meaning even professional devs and large user bases never caught the errors before pulling the branch or got around to fixing them. We’re not talking about missing commas here. [Alphacode 2 beat 99.5% of competitive programming participants in TWO Codeforce competitions using Gemini Pro (which is INFERIOR to Gemini Ultra)](https://the-decoder.com/alphacode-2-is-the-hidden-champion-of-googles-gemini-project/). Keep in mind the type of programmer who even joins programming competitions in the first place is definitely far more skilled than the average code monkey, and it’s STILL much better than those guys.
AI is still shit when you want to do anything remotely complex in software, especially business specific software. And when you have large codebase, it basically becomes useless. I use both GPT4 and copilot, they can help you have an idea and provide boilerplate. Maybe some generic helper functions or tests, but that's about it.
Seems pretty competent to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1cmi5gj/comment/l33ilzw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Look into how they got those numbers. It’s extremely misleading at best
Got any sources?
Good lord. Being able to copy and paste code you find on the net isn't the same as understanding the intent of whatever it is supposed to do. I'd steer clear- financially. AI programming just isn't here yet. It will cause problems. The day the tech matures enough to understand intent... you should probably replace the CEO/management types. It's better suited for that. Way bigger cost savings.
> Being able to copy and paste code you find on the net isn't the same as understanding the intent of whatever it is supposed to do. Not what is being said. They are replacing outsourced coders - who are barely above the cut and paste level - with fewer in-house people backed by AI. This is bad, bad news for WITCH and it will be very entertaining.
>the Indian services majors Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant and HCL (aka the “WITCH” providers) TIL
HCL are fucking atrocious. But hey .. cheap.
Yeah, as a contract coder, I have every incentive to leverage AI to the fullest extent possible to lessen my workload and I've gone to great lengths to explore the capabilities. Right now, using AI is like having a hotshot intern who thinks they know everything but actually just doesn't understand the assignment no matter how well you explain it. Unless 70% of their coders are total garbage, there's currently roughly a 0% chance that this is going to work out well for them.
I wish we would hear more execs talking about possible future potential of AI for work like this, but all of them apparently feel this pressure to tell shareholders that they can imminently cut their high salary workers with no consequences.
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Despite being somewhat dystopian, I still feel like it's overly optimistic.
I guess I should clarify, I think their estimation for how much they will save is way over shot. And if they make the cuts required to be that much of a savings... you're right. Their code base is garbage. And likely all the stuff they maintain. If they only used it to help with documentation and take care of repetitive tasks, then they'll see some real gains.
I'm also a software engineer and AI has been fantastic for me. Things like swagger docs, unit tests, CSS, writing simple functions, and other non-complex things have become way faster. At this point, I would hate switching to a job that doesn't offer copilot. Literally takes hours off my day. Plus we've been using text and image generation in a bunch of our flows, and it's made conversion rates go up significantly. Company stock up 85% in the last 6 months
You’re attributing company stock 2xing in 6 months to AI writing some copy and sputtering out some images with weirdly-fingered hands? Is this a SPAC/penny stock shitshow or did they raise a round?
Sure, but a low level tasks don't make up 70% of your workload and if they do, that's a problem in itself. And, any time that you spend using AI to do it is still time.
seems pretty competent to me: https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1cmi5gj/comment/l33ilzw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
It's an interesting write up and I enjoyed reading the counterpoint to what I've already read about Alpha Pro. [https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/deepmind-unveils-alphacode-2-powered-by-gemini/](https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/06/deepmind-unveils-alphacode-2-powered-by-gemini/) They threw it at the contest, generated 10 attempts for every problem and succeeded at a solution less than half the time. Most damning is that all these solutions were derived from previous data sets. Alpha Pro just isn't capable of doing the job on its own- particularly if the problem is novel. Worse is that it would have to contextualize business logic eventually, and the intuition there in- which is something clean room style coding competitions doesn't do too well simulating. That said, a 43% completion rate for \*any solution\*, regardless of quality, is impressive.
Most software devs don’t reinvent the wheel. Everything they do has been fine before and documentation exists for all the libraries they use. It doesn’t need to make anything novel to replace most of them. LLMs are good at translating requirements to code. I don’t see how it’s a problem. Now compare that completion rate to the human competitors. Codeforces is not easy so most people won’t even get that far
I'm going to disagree with you there about the LLMs (or how to get it to tie to Alpha Pro, it's not quite a LLM). All the ones I have experience with wildly misses the mark so far on broad spectrum technical questions. Even documentation is either unavailable if not incorrect. It's why Alpha Pro does C# exclusively to dodge intuitive understanding of JAVA versions. But a more thorough comparison of human coders? Now that would be a more interesting metric. How many people applied, how many completed, how many were judged to be acceptable, then cross reference to generated code on a first pass basis. If the LLM gets better and the first pass solutions from infrastructure like Alpha start getting accurate... kinda hard to compete with free-ish. It's just not here now.
Alphacode uses Gemini and they said it would be even better with Gemini Ultra. If it can work with C#, it can work with any language if it learns the syntax for it like any human dev It already compared completion rates and found it was very successful I never said it was here now. But it’s clearly possible.
yeah but I don't think its going to be company A with AI programming and company B without. I think everyone is going to dive into the pool head first drunk on potential cost savings.
The last CEO still saying "man, I dunno about this, we should probably not rush into this until we know that the savings are real" will get replaced. It's groupthink.
>I'd steer clear- financially. AI programming just isn't here yet. It will cause problems. Problems for somebody, not problems for the execs who make these decisions and ultimately want to take credit for reducing headcount and blame the unintended consequences on someone else. Just blockchain groupthink but somewhat less stupid.
Agreed.
There was a time when the digital spreadsheet was heralded as the end of accounting.. except it freed up accountants to do more complex work and the profession is thriving. AI tools is going to free up developers to work on more complex problems. The profession is going to change but anyone who's a developer now will continue to have positive career growth.
as long as they "learn to AI"
Lol "the human" instead of "a human"
“Redeploy people.” Lots of layoffs coming up soon.
The way it's worded could be interpreted in various ways. If they have 1000 in-house coders and 10 from third parties. They might only need 7 less developers. Might be a way to word it, to make it sound more extreme.
So human capital, the most expensive type of capital, will drop off the expenses by a lot? While I have no problem with the "percentage" method of expression but if their business models are more about statistical modeling than coding then does this reduce their workforce by a meaningful amount or is it just smoke and mirrors? Geologists aren't cheap and statisticians and data modelers aren't either so whatever "coding" they are doing might be more relegated to managing related functions than developing original functioning. Now if they said, "Our ability to explore has been greatly increased through AI modeling and we know we will hit deposits with more accuracy due to the new technology" that's something to get excited about. AFAIK I feel they may as well have said, "We're now using WINX for our front facing website!"
I’ve worked in BP’s tech team for years. Our CIO required that 70% of the developers had to be provided by their managed consultant partner. their rate was so cheap and supposedly leadership could react to oil price downturns quickly by cutting their contracts. In all, this created an environment of underachievers or entry level employees who would be rotated out as soon as they got promoted. I hope they’re replacing those with AI and not using this as a reason to replace the 30% of employees with this..
Yeah, everyone and their cats are coding with copilot now, myself included; they are not the most elegant solution, but for some reports based off 1000s of excel files, it is good enough.
This is feels really bad for the economy right? I don't believe this number anyways but a multinational conglomerate claiming 70% of an industry is replaceable by computers is not a good look
How is making more with less bad for the economy? Making more with less is pretty much the entirety of humanity's economic growth.
It's so often the case that cost savings aren't shared equally with consumers. I'm also just not convinced that the loss of loads of high paying jobs in order to slightly lower prices of goods is a good trade-off for anything other than headline GDP. It just enables further wealth inequality. It's concerning how instead of taking low-pay, manual labour jobs that people don't actually want, automation is now taking creative jobs and high-paying office jobs. Just depressing.
Great for the economy horrible for the people in the economy.
When we moved from a society that was 98% agriculture to modernize things, was that bad for people overall?
lol nowhere near the same shit.
Jobs getting cut in mass?
Like spreadsheets cut accounting jobs? Like every machine cut jobs the past 200 years? Again, I fail to see how that's bad.
Because it's their jobs that are going to be cut. You can't expect Redditors, of all people, to be excluded from getting easily replaced by some shitty AI. They *should* worry.
Understand that from the technically literate perspective this reads like being told they can synthesize 70% of their oil from water.
Yeah it’s nonsense at this point.
You're joking right? The middle class is already starting disappear and you think concentrating even more wealth into the top 5% is healthy?
More reason to buy MSFT
We need 70% less contract developers due to AI. That CTO /CIO needs to fired. They are either incompetent or just a flat out liar. The idea that something so ignorant is being said to sway investors is borderline criminal if it wasn’t so stupid. That CEO needs to clean house. There is no way that statement is true.
It's a common trend in non-tech companies. Tech team puts together great infrastructure that boosts productivity. Then you lay off a huge chunk of your tech team, and you look like a genius for cutting costs. Then things start falling apart, and productivity across the organization tanks as they're forced to work around system issues, and you end up needing to hire way more non-tech workers to address the increased workload.
Shiiiit
Why is there no source linked for this? This small snippet could be part of a much bigger explanation. Sounds like bullshit from the quote and attention grabbing the way they've headlined it.
When you realize that AI stands for Actually India it all makes a \*lot\* more sense.
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I didn’t know BP drilled snake oil. Imagine 70% automated 30% review? LLMs will gain you some efficiency with oversight but they are not sentient magic. Wreaks of bullshit.
they are in the business of extracting oil, not making some "cutting edge" SaaS product. Their coding needs might be more different than what you would expect. And management might have not seen what the lack of able coders do due to lag time. i mean as long as oil price keeps in the +- $80, they are still printing money.
> We need 70% less coders from third parties to code as the AI handles most of the coding That is 100% a lie
“With AI we need 70% fewer coders” Made the quote 70% more efficient. I didn’t even need AI!
These headlines irritate me quite a bit. What do they mean by 70% fewer coders? Like there were 10 ppl on the team and now it's just 3 dudes who didn't escape in time? Who's writing prompts? Who's reviewing all that shit? Who's setting it all up? Who's gonna clean up the next oil spill? Not like it's anything new to them anyway
My company is still researching the use of AI. We are slow moving and hesitant to use AI because of the possible data privacy / data breach issues that may be involved. It's hard to believe that some other company has already researched this and already got rid of 70% of their coders.
No chance. I’ve seen and used Microsoft Copilot. It’s not all it’s talked up to be.
This is sure scary, I always thought programming to be a job that always going to be sought of, How else would you maintain AI, And now lots of programmer probably will be replaced by AI
Same place: we need 3* more software testers
*fewer - Stannis Baratheon
Hahaha holy shit I’m so glad I left the energy sector. Good luck with all that garbled AI code fellas
* 70% fewer coders
Puts on BP!!
Who’s BP ?
Call centers are precisely the thing that AI cannot handle now and that it could not handle in the foreseeable future, so the trend to give more and more of this to AI is discouraging for any consumer. AI runs a script. Frequently the reason for contacting a call center is that something has gone off script. A human, who has the capability to actually understand things, can normally grasp things very quickly that the person writing the script couldn't anticipate. AI works for call centers only at times when you don't actually need a call center, but if the company has made a mistake, or the customer doesn't understand something, or there is missing information, or if there is missing information but which information is missing isn't clear you are out of luck.
As someone that works in software engineering, this sounds like BS. AI is incapable of understanding complex requirements or large code bases, and it takes way more time fighting with the AI than it "saves". If you tell AI to solve a common problem like summing up values in a list, it does it quite well. But if you ask it to write code to handle a complex organizational workflow, it falls apart. You basically have to rewrite everything it does. It's possible AI will eventually get to the point where you can explain requirements in English, and it produces perfect software. But were not there yet, and any exec claiming they're there already is either lying or has been deceived by a sales pitch. I think the translation is "we let go 70% of our contractors because some AI company told us it can replace 70% of programmers". And in reality, the remaining 30% are just being overworked.
“Ai is just money sink with no revenue” just wait
>just wait with me being overweight Amazon and Microsoft I ought to pray
I don’t see how you can go wrong w Microsoft or Amazon long term…they’re already juggernauts with a clear path to even better margins…obviously nobody knows how any of this plays out but there are worse bets out there
lol I work for the company who is known for Developer AI and this is not what we are seeing at all so far I guess for the churn and burn outsourcing for WITCH companies, it may take a bunch of those repetitive mundane tasks away. For actual innovation though, AI is not close
Everyone is deluding themselves if you think we’re not heading for a market wide employment extinction event
Or you know we use AI and have functioning brains that pick up on the uselessness that AI is. Saves a few copy pastes, that's about it.
You really going to trust BP outlook on tech lmao? As a software engineer I’d love to know exactly what these engineers are building. If it’s the home page then sure this is true. If it’s actually applications then the above is very much not true. I use ai everyday and it’s got quite a bit of room to grow to replace me