"Mechanically, more efficiency means less people required for the same output."

Why can't it mean more output with the same number of people? If I pay 100 people for 8 hours of labor a day, and after making some changes to our processes, the volume of work completed is up 10% per day, what is that if not an efficiency gain? What would you call it?

It really depends on the amount of work. If the demand for your labor is infinite, or at least always more than you can do in a days work, efficiency gains won't result in layoffs, just more work completed per shift. If the demand for the work is limited, efficiency gains will likely result in layoffs because there's no point in paying someone who was freed up by your new processes to sit around twirling a pen all day.

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tux3 3 days ago | parent [-]

All else equal, the demand for support calls doesn't go up as your support becomes more efficient.

I get that we're trying to look for positive happy scenarios, but only considering the best possible world instead of the most likely world is bias. It's Optimistic in the sense of Voltaire.

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missedthecue 3 days ago | parent [-]

What i'm saying is that if the volume of support is high enough, and never even changed, it's completely possible to improve throughput without reducing demand for labor. The result is simply that you improve response times.

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tux3 3 days ago | parent [-]

But I think this comes back to the same question of understaffing/overwork. We have to ask what strategic thinking led to accept long response times in the past. And the answer is unequivocal.

Unless we're claiming there is an intractable qualified labor shortage in call centers, this is always the result of a much simpler explanation: it's much cheaper to understaff call centers

A company that wants to save money by adding more AI is a company that cares about cost cutting. Like most companies.

The strategy that caused the company to understaff have not changed. The result is that we go back to homeostasis, and less jobs are needed to reach the same deliberate target.

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missedthecue 3 days ago | parent [-]

OK, but in that case, we reach status quo but with fewer employees. Doesn't that meet your definition of efficiency gains?

	▲	tux3 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yep. I was arguing that in this case more efficiency means you can't need as many jobs as you would otherwise. That does meet my definition of efficiency gain if there are fewer employees. Whether that's a good thing and for whom is another question.