I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call. Aside from the obvious frontline support, artist, junior coder etc, a whole bunch of white collar "pay me for advice on X" jobs (dietician, financial advice, tax agent, etc), where the advice follows set patterns only mildly tailored for the recipient, seem to be severely at risk. Example: I recently used Gemini for some tax advice that would…
It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring. As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it. Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are develo…
It doesn't have to. It can replace having no support at all.
It would be possible to run a helpdesk for a free product. It might suck but it could be great if you are stuck.
Support call centers usually work in layers. Someone to pick up the phone who started 2 days ago and knows nothing. They forward the call to someone who managed to survive for 3 weeks. Eventually you get to talk to someone who knows something but can't make decisions.
It might take 45 minutes before you get to talk to only the first helper. Before you penetrate deep enough to get real support you might lose an hour or two. The LLM can answer instantly and do better than tortured minimum wage employees who know nothing.
There may be large waves of similar questions if someone or something screwed up. The LLM can do that.
The really exciting stuff will come where the LLM can instantly read your account history and has a good idea what you want to ask before you do. It can answer questions you didn't think to ask.
This is specially great if you've had countless email exchanges with miles of text repeating the same thing over and over. The employee can't read 50 pages just to get up to speed on the issue, if they had the time you don't so you explain again for the 5th time that delivery should be on adress B not A and be on these days between these times unless it are type FOO orders.
Stuff that would be obvious and easy if they made actual money.