Every October and November, brick-and-mortar and online retailers recruit temporary workers to meet the high demand of the holiday shopping season. But this year's employees are not just people. AI agents work in the background, helping to automate customer support tickets and train employees faster and more efficiently. While Amazon (AMZN) is hiring 250,000 workers this fall, most of them are seasonal, the broader market data shows the demand for seasonal workers has decreased 12 percent from 2021 peak value.
Although the decline in demand for seasonal workers is not the result of the introduction of AI agents, there is no doubt that there is a change if it does, said Guillaume Luccison, founder and CEO of Yuma AI, an AI platform that serves Shopify's business customers. “What you're looking at here this holiday season, next year will be 2x or 3x,” Luccison told the Observer. “AI agents are one of the reasons why the workforce is changing.”
Already, Yuma AI's top salespeople are automating 40 to 60 percent of customer support tickets, improving customer service and doing value-added work for human support agents. very interesting, says Luccison.
Luccison's sentiment is echoed by Sid Sharma, vice president of Agora, a customer service agent chat platform. “The periodic hiring of e-commerce customer service needs and physical retail settings is about to change in significant ways,” he told the Observer.
AI agents have the potential to address the significant challenge of seasonal employment. While seasonal jobs provide employment opportunities, they “create a nightmare for retailers,” Sharma said, “between the need to quickly train, onboard and manage a large influx of new employees and the goal of handling as many sales contacts as possible during the busiest shopping season of the year.” Then, those employees leave, carrying the facility's information and restarting the clock at the dealership, Sharma added.
Of course, using AI instead of well-trained humans during the busiest shopping time of the year has its risks. For example, missteps such as “opinion raising,” where chatbots delight customers with custom items or returns, show how unsupervised AI can mislead a brand's strategy and destroy trust, said Bill Magnuson, founder and CEO of the data and communications platform. Braze, he told the Observer.
Even in companies that still employ seasonal workers in large numbers, the training of those workers is improving. John Scott, head of learning and design at MasterClass, said productive AI is redefining the high-pressure training environment for traditional holidaymakers. Rather than preloading all training into a knowledge dump, the new era of employee training creates continuous learning. “It makes learning a lot more sticky,” Scott said.
The new Masterclass at Work program caters to organizations that want to prioritize specific skills by using generative AI tools to display video clips from the platform's extensive library, allowing them to create learning programs tailored to each customer.
Scott also envisions productive AI chatbots that improve human interaction in the training process, enabling employees to ask questions without fear of judgment. “This idea that I can feel less vulnerable and less judged in my interactions is a powerful technology,” he said.
