Listening to @EzraKlein podcast and I had to do the ole' pause-and-tweet. Guest @andrewyang2020 says "Google demonstrated technology that can basically replace call center agents"... Nope! That is waay off.
fonolo.com/blog/2018/07/n… #cctr 1/
fonolo.com/blog/2018/07/n… #cctr 1/
It's meaningless to talk about anything "replacing a cctr agent" b/c that's not a specific job, like shoemaker. An agent could be a bank teller / nurse / computer tech. They just happen to be doing their job while interacting remotely, rather than in-person. 2/
To the point of cctr jobs disappearing, BLS stats disagree, and my decade experience in the sector lines up with that. 3/ 
My best guess as to why: The universe of transactions that we do remotely keeps expanding (displacing in-person interactions), and this outweighs any contraction we get from automation. More: fonolo.com/blog/2016/08/n… 4/
The way we do self-service keeps changing, eg phone-based IVR replaced by text-based chatbots, but there seems to be a ceiling to how much we can automate. Every business has a long-tail of interactions that are too rare, or too volatile, to be worth adapting into self-serve. 5/
Maybe today you book your flight via mobile app, maybe next year via Siri, but that's replacing what you would've done via an online form, so this progress is not chipping away at the agent's role. 6/
In fact, just thinking about this as the “call center” story is misleading. Whether the person sits in a cubicle or works from home misses point: More human-to-human jobs can be done remotely due to 1) Tech improvements; 2) willingness of consumers to interact that way. 7/
Combine the "more jobs can be remote" w the "self-service ceiling" effect, and this is a force for not just maintaining employment, but bringing oppty to regions that need it most. Link to the podcast: X/
