Chatbots are bad news for Indian BPOs and the reason is quite obvious

Chatbots, or chat robots, are considered as the next big thing in the tech world but they may not be good for the Indian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector.

Chatbots, which are computer programme that simulates human conversation or chat through artificial intelligence, can replace customer service representatives and take away jobs of many in the BPO industry.

Biggies such as Facebook, Google, Skype are opting for chatbots for news, weather, taxi services and slowly they also enter the BPO segment.
Raman Roy of Quatrro told ET, “The repetitive tasks started going away more than a decade ago, it has already happened and will continue to happen, while we are adapting, more and more of these low-end tasks will go away, you can see the signs.”

Meanwhile, Susir Kumar of Intelenet told ET that robots will take away more and more of the "mundane human" tasks.

"The billing will never be wrong, the line will never drop. But, as technology evolve, transactions will become more complicated and need for human intervention will arise for different kind of jobs," he added.

As per reports, chatbots is still at a nascent stage and the scope for automation would be around six per cent of the $2-3 billion domestic BPO industry.