Dukaan lays off 90 per cent staff; replaces them with AI chatbot

E-commerce startup Dukaan laid off 90 per cent of its customer support team and replaced them with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Founder and CEO Suumit Shah said on Tuesday that the company is focusing on prioritising profitability. He observed that the decision to lay off staff reduced customer support costs by 85 per cent while resolution time went down from over two hours to three minutes.

"We had to lay off 90 per cent of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely," Shah tweeted.

"Given the state of economy, startups are prioritising "profitability" over striving to become "unicorns", and so are we," Shah added."

'Why would someone with a tech/product expertise work as a support agent?'

"It’s like - Lionel Messi doing a full time job at Decathlon, though the theory has some merit, but is ultimately flawed," he said in another tweet.

He explained in detail about Lina, the AI assistant which he claimed, replaces generic and delayed responses, as well as limited availability of resources and poor communication.

When a user asked what assistance did the company offer to the staff who were laid off, he responded saying, "As expected, 'someone' will get offended on behalf of 'someone else', so I had this reply ready: Assistance ke bare mein jab Linkedin pe post karunga tab dekh lena mere dost, yahaan Twitter pe log "profitability" dekhte hai "sympathy" nahi."