Octopus Energy, a UK-based household energy supplier, claims that artificial intelligence is doing the work of 250 employees.
Greg Jackson, writing in The Times of London, stated that the corporation had been testing with AI for several months. He stated that the technology had been integrated into company systems and that employees began allowing it to respond to some consumer emails in February.
According to Jackson, AI now responds to more than a third of consumer emails, which is the labour of almost 250 employees.
He continued: “Emails written by AI delivered 80% customer satisfaction — comfortably better than the 65% achieved by skilled, trained people.”
A representative for Octopus Energy told Insider: “Our team supervises the answers AI provides, so, for example, drafting a personalized response that a team member can review and then send on.”
Workers at other companies recently reported on the experience of using AI tools to help carry out their work. One worker told Vice that OpenAI’s ChatGPT did 80% of their job.
Jackson told the Times of London that the development was unlikely to lead to job losses at his company but that the pace of AI technology had the potential to cause “huge and rapid dislocation” to the job market.
In March, a report from Goldman Sachs found that generative AI tools like ChatGPT could lead to “significant disruption” in the labor market and affect around 300 million full-time jobs globally.
The survey states that the white-collar workers, particularly those in legal services and administration, are among those most likely to be impacted by new AI capabilities.
According to the paper, AI systems might enhance global labour productivity and create new jobs.
