CEO fires 90% of staff saying AI outperforms them
Written by Pheodora Waqanibaravi on July 15, 2023
Suumit Shah, a 31-year-old CEO of an e-commerce platform called Dukaan based in India, is getting torn to shreds online for firing 90 percent of the company’s customer support staff after arguing that an AI chatbot had outperformed them. In a lengthy twitter thread laden with screenshots from action movies such as “iRobot” and “Limitless,” Shah argued that response times plummeted from over two hours to less than two minutes thanks to the AI chatbot. “Make no mistake,” one Twitter user wrote “The support team was laid off here because business is failing and funding is dry. Not because of AI.”But gloating about laying off most of your customer support staff on Twitter isn’t just inhumane. It also shows how little tech CEOs like Shah actually care about the people that work for them.
