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Now the only question is when. When does this bubble burst? Great promise, replace all your call centre staff, then your developers with AI. It is cheaper, b

Now the only question is when. When does this bubble burst? Great promise, replace all your call centre staff, then your developers with AI. It is cheaper, but only because the AI companies are not charging you what it really costs to do the work.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
One of my specialties is implementing hosted call centers using Amazon Connect - the AWS version of the call center that Amazon uses internally. The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5. That pays for a lot of inference.
- rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  pricing as an objection to ai is just cope. it might hurt the current status quo when they can no longer burn capital, but the long-term course will remain unchanged
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    Prices will literally have to go up by 1500x+ in the above scenario to make it cheaper for a human agent. I assure you that AWS is big losing money running Nova Lite 2 (the model I use for speed and low latency) with their own models running on their own custom chips. I calculated the full cost of a call to be $0.05 cents a minute when handled by AI and that includes charges for a 1800 number and the varios other AWS services it uses. Nova does the processing of the text after a separate voice to text service (Lex)
    - jimnotgym 8mo ago
      That's great, but it sounds like Amazon has a specific model trained for this service? And I guess that Amazon funded the development in a sustainable way. Is any of that true for Anthropic and OpenAI?
      - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
        No, its just one of the many models hosted on Bedrock. Bedrock has all of the popular models except for OpenAI which is exclusive to Microsoft. Nova Lite isn’t the best model. But what I need it for to turn random voice transcriptions into well defined JSON I can use deterministically downstream quickly, it’s perfect and fast.
- nebula8804 8mo ago
  >The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5. Are you kidding me?! It costs that much for the utter trash that I have deal with every company? A poor 1990s VOIP sounding connection to some random place in the Philippines while I try to get my issue solved in excruciating annoyance when they cannot follow my standard english flow or they cannot speak loud or clearly.
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    All of the call centers I’ve worked with have had America based agents. Most were public sector - state governments and colleges. I worked at AWS in the public sector division of their Professional Services division for about 4 years as a consultant. (Yes full time direct hire “blue badge” employee with the same 4 year base + signing bonus + 4 year 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting). I have heard of companies that have gotten it down to 50 cents per call using foreign customer service agents. But those aren’t the companies that are going to pay AWS ProServe bill rates or even the rate my current employee charges companies at my bill rate (not saying that’s what I make)

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

One of my specialties is implementing hosted call centers using Amazon Connect - the AWS version of the call center that Amazon uses internally. The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5. That pays for a lot of inference.

rhubarbtree 8mo ago
pricing as an objection to ai is just cope. it might hurt the current status quo when they can no longer burn capital, but the long-term course will remain unchanged
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Prices will literally have to go up by 1500x+ in the above scenario to make it cheaper for a human agent. I assure you that AWS is big losing money running Nova Lite 2 (the model I use for speed and low latency) with their own models running on their own custom chips. I calculated the full cost of a call to be $0.05 cents a minute when handled by AI and that includes charges for a 1800 number and the varios other AWS services it uses. Nova does the processing of the text after a separate voice to text service (Lex)
  - jimnotgym 8mo ago
    That's great, but it sounds like Amazon has a specific model trained for this service? And I guess that Amazon funded the development in a sustainable way. Is any of that true for Anthropic and OpenAI?
    - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
      No, its just one of the many models hosted on Bedrock. Bedrock has all of the popular models except for OpenAI which is exclusive to Microsoft. Nova Lite isn’t the best model. But what I need it for to turn random voice transcriptions into well defined JSON I can use deterministically downstream quickly, it’s perfect and fast.
nebula8804 8mo ago
>The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5. Are you kidding me?! It costs that much for the utter trash that I have deal with every company? A poor 1990s VOIP sounding connection to some random place in the Philippines while I try to get my issue solved in excruciating annoyance when they cannot follow my standard english flow or they cannot speak loud or clearly.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  All of the call centers I’ve worked with have had America based agents. Most were public sector - state governments and colleges. I worked at AWS in the public sector division of their Professional Services division for about 4 years as a consultant. (Yes full time direct hire “blue badge” employee with the same 4 year base + signing bonus + 4 year 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting). I have heard of companies that have gotten it down to 50 cents per call using foreign customer service agents. But those aren’t the companies that are going to pay AWS ProServe bill rates or even the rate my current employee charges companies at my bill rate (not saying that’s what I make)