Dukaan replaces 90% support staff with AI chatbots

Enterprise ecommerce startup Dukaan has replaced 90% of its support staff with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, said Co-founder and CEO Suumit Shah in a tweet.

Speaking about the necessity of AI today, he said that the time to first response went from 1 minute & 44 seconds to "INSTANT!" and resolution time went from 2 hours and 13 minutes to 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

"Given the state of economy, startups are prioritising "profitability" over striving to become "unicorns," and so are we," said Suumit in his tweet.

"Customer Support had been a struggle for us since long & fixing it felt like an opportunity to me," he added.

Shah also announced the launch of an AI as a service platform called Bot9, which will allow businesses to leverage AI chatbots, that understand their products, to answer customer queries. The API uses chatGPT as its brain and is available for $69 per month on the website.

The platform was conceived out of a weekend hackathon, Suumit told YourStory. Whether the founders and Dukaan will spend significant time, energy, and money on Bot9 is not clear.

"Pata nahi, for now it's just a basic MVP, and I don't think it can grow as fast as (other AI tools like) Midjourney. In case it does, will see how we can run it as a full fledged business," Suumit said.

"My next 20 years are commited to Dukaan, no change in plans," he added.

Shah had revealed Dukaan's AI assistant, Lina, a month ago in a Facebook post. The virtual assistant can answer account-specific as well as general queries about Dukaan's features and workings.

The layoffs came just three days after Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Union Minister of State for Electronics, Information and Technology, dismissed concerns about AI taking away jobs in India as "nonsense" and "bakwas".

Chandrasekhar compared the fear of AI taking jobs to the Y2K scare in 1999, stating that some people tend to focus on the worst-case scenario of any innovation. He firmly stated that AI will not take away jobs.