OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is warning that entire job categories could be wiped out by artificial intelligence, echoing widespread concerns that the technology could have devastating effects on the human labor market.
During his most recent trip to Washington, DC, Altman told Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision Michelle Bowman that “some areas” in the job market will be “just like totally, totally gone” as they’re replaced by AI agents.
Altman identified customer support roles as a “category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”
“Now you call one of these things and AI answers,” he said. “It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do.”
The billionaire, who’s unlikely to have had to personally speak to a customer support agent on the phone in quite some time, effectively threw humans under the bus during the remarks.
“It does not make mistakes,” he added. “It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”
How close OpenAI’s tech actually is to that goal is questionable. Critics say that AI tends to replace human labor with an alternative that’s unreliable and prone to unexpected edge cases.
There are also practical considerations: we’ve already seen companies getting huge amounts of negative attention for attempting to ditch human workers in favor of unproven AI.
It’s gotten to the point where companies are admitting that they’re going back on their promises to ditch human workers. Fintech company Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who previously boasted that an AI assistant would do the job of 700 people, ended up reversing course, announcing that “from a brand perspective… I just think it’s so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want.”
A study found last year that the majority of customers do not want companies to use AI for customer service.
And who could blame them? Glaring problems plaguing currently available AI models mean the tech is causing chaos and frustration. Earlier this year, for instance, a customer found that they were getting mysteriously logged out by AI-powered software coding assistant, Cusor. An AI-powered customer support agent told them it was “expected behavior” under a new login policy — which turned out to be a hallucination by the glitchy AI.
In short, Altman’s imagining a future that doesn’t exist yet, and may or may not actually materialize. But it’s one he wants to see: as the leader of one of the most successful AI companies in the industry, he has plenty to gain.
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