Uber last week cut 10 percent of jobs in its customer-service operation as part of a restructuring designed to “embrace artificial intelligence”.
The move is the latest evidence that the contact-centre industry’s long-standing reassurance – that AI will help human agents rather than replace them – is beginning to unravel.
Major employers are increasingly using automated chat and phone systems to handle the everyday requests that once filled agent queues, and fewer people are needed to answer them.
Speaking to UC Today, Ashish Nagar, founder and CEO of customer experience platform Level AI, predicts employment in customer-service roles will fall by 10-30 percent over the next five to 10 years, depending on the sector.
“Once a week I get the question, what happens to CS [contact centre] jobs in three to 10 years?” Nagar said.
“My answer has been: a 10–30 percent decline from current levels over five to 10 years and dependent on verticals.”
That is not a prediction of an overnight collapse in contact-centre employment, but is a clear rejection of the idea that AI will simply make the existing workforce more productive while leaving its size untouched.
Uber Makes the Link Explicit
Uber’s cuts, reported on 22 July, affected 10 percent of its community operations team, which is responsible for customer support.
An Uber spokesperson said the changes were intended to “simplify operations, strengthen in-person collaboration, and continue to embrace AI”.
In an internal memo, Megha Yethadka, Uber’s vice president of global community operations, said: “We cannot scale frontier technology on top of fragmented processes.”
The company has not said AI alone caused every role reduction. But the timing and wording matter. Uber is reducing support capacity while expanding its AI strategy and directing users who seek help through its app towards automated support.
That goes beyond familiar agent-assist uses, such as generating a call summary, finding a knowledge-base article or suggesting a response.
When a chatbot or voice agent resolves an issue without a person entering the interaction, it is not assisting a human agent. It is doing work that an agent would previously have performed.
The Cuts Are Already Happening
Uber is not an isolated example.
Bloomberg has reported that the Commonwealth Bank of Australia has cut hundreds of contractors from a Johannesburg chat-support operation as AI took on more customer conversations. The bank said in May that its chat platform was resolving almost nine in 10 conversations without agent input.
CBA said it added more than 140 roles across its Australian contact centres over the previous six months, but that does not negate the impact on workers at the outsourced provider, Nutun, whose contract with the bank was reduced.
Microsoft has also expanded automation across its support operation.
