CEO Fires 90 Percent of Support Staff, Saying AI Outperforms Them

He's getting absolutely roasted.

Tough But Necessary

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.

It was an unusually callous announcement that clearly didn't sit well with plenty of netizens, as Insider reports.

"We had to layoff [sic] 90 percent of our support team because of this AI chatbot," he tweeted. "Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely."

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.

Talk to the Bot

But not everybody is buying the CEO's excuse for laying off dozens of employees, allegedly cutting his customer support budget to just $100 a month.

"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."

Others pointed out the quality of Dukaan's customer service plummeted as well.

"It wasn’t answering as I needed it to," another user wrote. "I tried tweaking my questions several ways because I know it was a bot. It just didn’t reply properly. It left me frustrated and ultimately didn’t bother renewing my premium plan."

"I'm terrified of the future where we will never speak to a human again in customer support which means we will never get a problem solved you'll just be passed around between bots," one Redditor wrote.

No Ragrets

Shah, however, told Insider that he had no choice — though he did say he regretted posting about the layoffs on social media.

"Over time, everybody will start doing this," he said. "It's not just us. Maybe I'm just too straightforward to have put it on Twitter."

And of course, he's not entirely wrong. Plenty of tech companies have announced layoffs while also making huge investments in AI tech, Insider pointed out.

The prognosis is pretty grim as well, with researchers warning that plenty more jobs will be taken away from humans and given to bots in the near future.

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.

More on AI layoffs: Insider Lays Off 10 Percent of Staff After Announcing Pivot to AI