AI is doing the work of 250 people at an energy company and satisfying customers better than trained workers, CEO says

• The CEO of Octopus Energy says AI is doing the work of hundreds of people at the company.
• Writing in The Times of London, Greg Jackson said the company had been using AI for months.

The CEO of Octopus Energy, a UK-based household energy supplier, says artificial intelligence is doing the work of 250 people at the company.

Writing in The Times of London, Greg Jackson said the company had been experimenting with AI for several months. He said the technology had been incorporated into company systems and staff began letting it reply to some customer emails in February.

Now, AI replied to more than a third of customer emails, which is the work of about 250 people, Jackson said.

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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 report highlighted white-collar workers, especially those working in legal services and administration, as some of the most likely to be affected by new AI tools.

The report also said AI systems could boost global labor productivity and create new jobs.