Comment on VCs are starting to partner with private equity to buy up call centers, accounting firms and other "mature companies" to replace their operations with AI

• Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  That’s not what this is. They find profitable businesses and replace employees with Ai and pocket the spread.

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  • MintyFresh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    They’re rent seeking douchbags who don’t add value to shit. If there was ever an advertisement for full on vodka and cigarettes for breakfast bolshevism it’s these assholes.

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  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    It only works until the inevitable costs from the accumulated problems due to AI use (mainly excessivelly high AI error rates with a uniform distribution - were the most damaging errors are no less likely than little mistakes, unlike with humans who can learn to pay attention not to make mistakes in critical things - leading to customer losses and increased costs of correcting the errors) exceed the savings from cutting down manpower.

    (Just imagine customers doing things that severely damage their equipment because they followed the AI customer support line advice and the accumulation of cost as said customers take the company whose support line gave that advice to court for damages and win those rulings, and in turn the companies outsourcing customer support to that “call center supplier” take it to court. It gets even worse than that for accounting, as for example the fines from submitting incorrect documentation to the IRS can get pretty nasty)

    I expect we’ll see something similar to how many long established store chains at one point got managers who started cutting costs by getting rid of long time store employees and replacing them with an ever rotating revolving door of short term cheap as possible sellers, making the store experience inferior to just buying it from the Internet, and a few years later those chains were going bankrupt.

    These venture capitalists’ grift works as long as they sell the businesses before the side effects of replacing people with language generators haven’t fully filtered through into revenue falls, court judgements for damages and tax authority fines and it’s going to be those buying such businesses (I bet the Venture Capitalists are going to try and sell them to Institutional Investors) that will end up with something that’s leaking customers, having to pay mass8ve compensations and having to hire back people to fix the consequences of AI errors, essentially reverting what the Venture Capitalists did and them spending even more money to cleanup the trail of problems cause by the excessive AI use.

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    • CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      They’re VCs, they’re not here for the long run: they’ll replace the employees with AI, make record profits for a quarter, and sell their shares and leave before problems make themselves too noticeable to ignore. They don’t care about these companies, and especially not about the people working there

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      • tibi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        And when the economy goes boom, they will ask their friends in the White House for a bailout

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      • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Better yet, they buy a company, take a loan out against the company, pocket the cash and then leave the struggling company with the extra debt. When it dies they leave the scraps to be sold and employees and others owed money are left out to dry.

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